IPA sound generator?

Question

enter IPA code, get an output of what it sounds like. Is there such software, online or otherwise?

Answer 1

I'm very interested in that "synthesizer", too. I searched on the Internet and the closest thing I could find was a Text-To-Speech (TTS) demo from AT&T Labs on a Web page. Please see the Source section (1) below for the link.

As many other TTS applications, AT&T's lets you type text, then it "reads" it for you by generating and playing an audio file. Now, according to the documentation, you can change the way the speech sounds by altering the input text by using XML-style tags from the SSML standard. See (2) below. The Speech Synthesis Markup Language, or SSML, is defined by the W3C organization. See (3) below.

The problem is (or might be) that it doesn't support all SSML tags, or at least not all of its features. Here we're interested in typing IPA Unicode symbols directly into the textbox. I managed to make it "read" the word "cat" is IPA code (/kæt/), by including it inside the appropriate tag. You can try it at the demo page (http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/... by typing (Copy-Paste) the following:

<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="kæt">  </phoneme>

Note that the IPA code should be within the quotation marks in the <phoneme> tag. That's how it works... Well, unfortunately it didn't work for me all the time. I'm sorry I didn't have enough time to get the proper codes and make it work with other common words... But I think it's a start.