Use Text to Speech Pronunciation To Boost Your Content

One of the hardest things to master when it comes to learning a limited language, is its spoken audio because, in different languages, the same alphabet or letter combinations can have entirely different audio. For example, a person with a heavy Japanese accent tends to pronounce the letter ‘L’ like the letter ‘R.’ They say ‘lock’ instead of ‘rock.’ It is not that they aren’t pronouncing the word with an ‘L.’ They are pronouncing a sound between ‘L’ and ‘R’ because these audio don't exist in Japanese. This is similar to a lot of different languages such as Spanish where certain text such as 'J' and 'Y' could be pronounced differently.

The way an individual’s speech can have a big impact on whether or not people understand what is being said. Having good AI voices not only helps access with what you are saying but also eliminates miscommunication. Any website could offer a free service where they help you create an AI voice when you convert text - but is it the perfect voice?

To access the right pronunciation, you first have to hear it properly (without any background music). Secondly, it's essential to know how each letter and the combination of letters are pronounced in a particular language. And, if there are accented letters, it's an added plus to learn them as well. More importantly, it's key to understand intonation (the rise and fall of the natural sounding voice) and stress.

While there are numerous other ways to improve and access the right pronunciation in speech, what about (TTS) text to speech? In this article, we will cover what goes into achieving proper speaking rate in text to speech and, more specifically, Murf’s custom pronunciation feature.

Text to Speech Pronunciation: Using A Natural Sounding Voice

Achieving the right pronunciation using a text to speech software involves phonemes. Most text to speech systems today use a set of rules, known as a pronunciation dictionary, to map text to their corresponding phonemes. This allows the text to speech tools to access pronunciations correctly and produce natural-sounding speech. Some other speech synthesizers adopt a hybrid strategy: employing letter-to-sound rules for most words and catching the most common irregular words with a small ‘exceptions dictionary’ of 5,000 words or less. 

How to correct mispronunciation using text to speech tools? 

There can be certain times when you have mispronounced words in your existing audio file that you need corrected. For example, the words like “live” can be pronounced both as “liv” or “live”. Here’s how you can use text to speech tools such as Murf AI to correct this and adhere to your use cases! Do you have audio content on a google docs ready to go? Simply upload them into your Murf Studio and modify your speech output  ready for commercial use.

Correcting mispronunciation using a Text to Speech tool can typically be achieved by adjusting inputs or settings in the tool you're using. Here are some practical methods:

By Using Phonetic Spellings

Many text to speech tools allow you to modify pronunciation by inputting words phonetically. For example, if "niche" is pronounced incorrectly, you might input "neesh" to achieve the desired pronunciation. Using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) can help you achieve this. 

SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) Tags

If your text to speech tool supports SSML, you can control pronunciation using the <phoneme> tag. 

Break Down Syllables

Sometimes breaking the word into syllables or adding hyphens helps text to speech tools pronounce words correctly. For example: Instead of "comfortable," input "com-fort-a-ble."

Use Alternative Spellings

Inputting a commonly mispronounced word as it sounds (e.g., "uh-sim" for "asim") can help text to speech software produce the correct sound.

Adjust Speech Rate or Pitch

Mispronunciation issues may stem from speed or tone. If your TTS tool allows, adjust speech rate or pitch settings to enhance clarity.

Tool-Specific Pronunciation Dictionaries

Some TTS tools (like Amazon Polly, Google Cloud TTS, or Murf.ai) offer pronunciation dictionaries where you can create custom entries for specific words. 

Example: <phonemealphabet="ipa”ph="tʃɑːrlz">Charles</phoneme>

Manual Correction with Text To Speech Editors

Some text to speech tools have built-in pronunciation editors where you can manually test and refine word pronunciations.

By experimenting with these methods, you can effectively improve the accuracy of word pronunciation in text to speech tools. Of course, all may not work for your specific case, but definitely worth a shot. 

Pronunciation using Murf ( For Natural Sounding Speech)

With Murf, pronunciation can be achieved in two ways: a) using alternative spellings and b) custom pronunciation. 

Method 1: Alternative spelling

This involves breaking a word into its hyphenated syllables. Here are a few examples of words and how they sound before and after adding the alternate spelling. Take an example of the word unbelievable. You can break it down as un-be-liev-able to make it similar. Now, let’s take into consideration of a word that is spelt the same, but can be pronounced differently: 

Wound (as in, past tense of wind) - wownd

Before: 

After: 

Sans - sonz (UK English)

Before:

After: 

10000 - ten thousand

Before: 

After:

Camarillo - camaariyo

Before: 

After: 

Method 2: IPA chart  (Custom Voice User interface)

Murf supports what is known as smart suggestions, which present a range of IPAs for commonly used words. We suggest using third-party websites like Dictionary, Tophonetics, Wiktionary, Easypronunciation, and other websites on Google to acquire the right IPA for pronunciations. 

Here are examples of some words and their phonemes:

Accessing Custom Pronunciation in Murf Studio

To use this feature on Murf Studio, users can simply double-click on a word that requires correction in pronunciation and choose the right IPA or alternative spelling from the list offered. 

Users can also add the custom IPAs to the list of suggested pronunciations under the 'custom' tab by clicking on the 'Create Custom' button and access it anytime in the future. Murf refers to this as the Pronunciation Library. Once saved, it can be accessed by selecting ‘Manage Pronunciation’ at the bottom of the menu.

The custom library can also be shared with your teams. Previously saved custom audio are sorted by language. Users can also look up a previously saved custom pronunciation using the search bar.

Explore Murf’s Pronunciation Library

With Murf’s pronunciation library, fine tune your words to ensure that your communications are being perfectly recited the way you want it to.

Final Thoughts

For content creators, whose content is their main offering, pronunciation accuracy is key. In order to provide their content to a larger and more diverse population, they must create content that conveys the correct meaning, with the right pronunciation based on the surrounding context. This is where a platform like Murf that offers custom pronunciation, in addition to natural sounding speech, can be a boon. It makes the entire process of creating voiceovers a lot simpler and more exciting! 

Text to speech tools can be your way forward in perfecting pronunciation. Text to speech platforms such as Murf AI, makes your job way easier to generate high quality audio files ready for your website, YouTube in improving accessibility to your international audience that way converse in German, Hindi, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese or even a different English! So start generating a custom voice that is useful for customer interactions.

In a world where technology has made it accessible for all languages to generate support and services to convert any text into speech, it is vital for a user to generate an AI voice in their own languages with the apt pronunciation messages- whether it be for IVR systems or people with learning disabilities, or even people with visual impairments, listeners would need audio that resonates with them.