Python Arpabet phonetic transcription

Question

Is there a library in python that can convert words (mainly names) to Arpabet phonetic transcription?

BARBELS -> B AA1 R B AH0 L Z

BARBEQUE -> B AA1 R B IH0

Answer 1

What you want is variously called "letter to sound" or "grapheme to phoneme" engine. There are a few around, including one in every text-to-speech system.

I usually deal with non-US accents, for which I use espeak. It doesn't output arpabet directly (which is restricted to US sounds anyway), but you can coax it to attempt an American accent, and convert from IPA to arpabet later.

>>> from subprocess import check_output
>>> print check_output(["espeak", "-q", "--ipa",
                        '-v', 'en-us',
                        'hello  world']).decode('utf-8')
həlˈoʊ wˈɜːld

You can use -x rather than --ipa for espeak's own phone representation (it's ascii):

>>> check_output(["espeak", "-q", "-x", '-v', 'en-us', 'hello world'])
h@l'oU w'3:ld

Converting to arpabet isn't quite as simple as a character look-up though; for example "tʃ" should be converted to "CH", not the "T SH" that a greedy conversion would give you (except, that is, in odd cases like "swˈɛtʃɑːp" for "sweatshop").