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I would like to know how I could measure the pronunciation of two words. These two words are quite similar and differ only in one vowel. I know there is, e.g., the Hamming distance or the Levenshtein distance but they measure the "general" difference between words. I'm also interested in that but mainly I would like to know how they sound differently. I think there must be something like this to test text-to-speech results?

Best would even be an online source where I could just type in those two words.

Ben
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1 Answers1

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There are a handful of tools available for manually comparing pronounciations, though all are limited in some way. Depending on your usecase, you might be interested in:

  • Wikspeak: a tool that transcribes (single) words into IPA and generates a pronounciation. A web demo is available, though it’s a bit sensitive about browser versions.
  • espeak-ng: provides a CLI tool that does text-to-speech or text-to-IPA transcription
# use the —-ipa flag to display the inferred IPA transcription
espeak-ng -v en-US --ipa "horse”
# => hˈɔːɹs
espeak-ng -v en-US --ipa "hoarse"
# => hˈoːɹs

If you want a more automated solution, you could look into python libraries like eng-to-ipa to do IPA transcription (including disambiguation when a word can map to multiple IPA transcriptions). You could then try applying edit distance measurements to the IPA transcriptions to estimate the similarity of the pronounciations.

vlthr
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