Last modified 2 October 2011
I present the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) TTS (text-to-speech) bookmarklet. (Source)
Bookmarklet: IPA TTS (drag to your bookmark bar)
How to use: select any text that contains IPA and click on the bookmarklet. Wait a second for the iframe at the bottom of the page to load.
Try these examples: /ˌɪntəˈnæʃnəl/, /ˌɪntɚˈnæʃnəl/
How does this work?
The bookmark creates a POST request to the AT&T Natural Voices® Text-to-Speech Demo with the IPA text in SSML. The AT&T demo has modest support for IPA, but often fails. If you know of another IPA TTS engine, please let me know or fork the bookmarklet and add it.
Share on Facebook.
This is very exciting, but it doesn’t seem to work in Firefox 3.6. What am I missing?
Works for me in FireFox 3.6.6 on Mac OS X.
When I use it, the following frame appears at the bottom of the page: http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
But no sound plays. I’m using Windows 7.
That’s the expected behavior. Do you see anything in the iframe? It should be a media player for the wav file.
When you go directly to http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php and press “Speak”, what happens?
It loads a .wav file that reads the Terms of Service. But there’s no “International Phonetic Alphabet” option in Step 1.
What domain are you trying on? Does it work on Wikipedia, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France?
I have noticed it will apparently blacklist a referer, such as this page, but it will continue to allow other referers. I find it odd that you have an issue with Firefox, however, because AFAIK Firefox does not send HTTP Referer headers.
Also, they are using a few different IP addresses: 192.20.225.55 and 192.20.225.36. Both are working last I checked.
Ok. It works.
Okay, so.. I’ve tried this on IE 8, Google Chrome and Firefox 5.0. When I highlight some IPA and click on the link/bookmarklet, the browser tries to load something for a split second, but nothing happens.. nothing about the at&t demo showing up, or an iframe, or anything mentioned above..
I’m pretty clueless about this stuff, I have no idea what a frame is or anything like that.. so any sort of help would be awesome.
I’m having the same problem as Biggles…doesn’t actually do anything, just seems to load something for a second and that’s it…nothing.
Yeah, doesn’t seem to work for Chrome v14.0.835.186 either. **sadface**
Sorry about that. Textmate’s JavaScript-to-Bookmarklet feature sucks. Does it work now?
The easiest way to test it is to click the “IPA TTS” link above. It should give you a prompt.
Really cool idea.
It doesn’t ever seem to find any IPA when I select it on the page, but I can always type it in.
Some of the IPA symbols aren’t pronounced though, including o and ɒ.
Is this not complete?
This is working for me from Wikipedia on Firefox 9.0 and Windows xp pro, have to cut and paste into the prompt. From this page doesn’t work, but I can cut from this page, go to Wikipedia, select anything, click the bookmark, and paste the text from this page into the prompt. ˌɪntɚˈnæʃnəl comes out “international” with a clear, broad r.
Rolled r, ɾ, comes out as t. Thus ˈkʊmbɾiə comes out as ‘coom-tee-ah, which is really unhelpful. I suspect the speech program is limited in the phonemes it can render.
Nice. It seems to be missing some letters completely though (e.g. [ɬ]).
@Chris & James: yes, the bookmarklet uses a TTS speech engine by AT&T which has limited support for IPA.
Thank you so much! Now I will be able to pronounce all of the names on Wikipedia!