Speech accent and pronounciation improve

Question

Hi, my current project use speech service a lot, the accent for some languages are not good and some pronunciation is not standard for native speaker. Can you improve it?

Answer 1

Hello @jeong meekyong

Thanks a lot for reaching out to us. I have seen some similar reports for the pronuciation improvement need, and please check my below suggestions -

To improve the pronuciation, obviously you can share your feedback here so that I can forward it to product team, as a workaround you can use phonemes to improve pronunciation, you have SIPA, UPS and IPA for your selection:

What is phonemes?
Specifies the phonetic alphabet to use when you synthesize the pronunciation of the string in the ph attribute. The string that specifies the alphabet must be specified in lowercase letters. The following options are the possible alphabets that you can specify:
ipa – See SSML phonetic alphabets https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/speech-ssml-phonetic-sets
sapi – See SSML phonetic alphabets https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/speech-ssml-phonetic-sets
ups – See Universal Phone Set https://documentation.help/Microsoft-Speech-Platform-SDK-11/17509a49-cae7-41f5-b61d-07beaae872ea.htm

If you have never used SSML pronunciation alphabets before, I would try UPS first. It is like IPA, but all the letters are human readable and type on a standard keyboard. IPA, is more widely used by linguists, but takes some time to learn how to use.

How to use phonemes -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/speech-synthesis-markup#use-phonemes-to-improve-pronunciation

Please have a try above for workaround and please share your feedback to me about which language which word you think is not correct. Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Yutong

-Please kindly accept the answer if you feel helpful to support the community, thanks a lot.