Edge's Read Aloud Feature is Mispronouncing Chinese Pinyin

Question

Edge's Read Aloud feature is quite good. I often have it read Chinese characters and then read pinyin, the romanization of those characters. Recently, however, Edge has started mispronouncing pinyin, using English phonetics and butchering the words. I want to solve this problem as quickly as possible. Edge read pinyin beautifully before, and now it sounds as bad as my Kindle.

Here's an example：

安全 ānquán

This is the word "safe," written in characters and pinyin. Edge nails the characters but flubs the pinyin, and it doesn't matter which voice/accent I choose in Read Aloud. Please help.

Answer 1

Please try to do a repair as well by going to or pressing Windows key + I > Apps > Installed apps > look for Microsoft Edge and then click on the three dots on click on Modify and then click on Repair. Another thing that you can check and test is to download and install separate builds of Beta, Canary or Dev to see if the issue will also be replicated from there.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/download/insider

Answer 2

Hello, good day and thanks for your question. To add to the above, did this issue started after a recent update on Edge? Also, is it the same even if you try to do a reset via edge://settings/reset?

Answer 3

It seems that the mispronunciation of Chinese Pinyin in Edge's Read Aloud feature could be due to the phonetic set being used for the pronunciation. The Speech service for Chinese (zh-CN) is based on the native Pinyin set, which includes specific phonetic alphabets that may not be correctly applied in your current settings.

To improve the pronunciation, you might want to check if the correct voice settings are selected for Chinese Pinyin. Additionally, you can try using the SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) phoneme element to specify the pronunciation explicitly. For example, you can use the phoneme tag to define how specific words should be pronounced, ensuring that the correct phonetics are applied.

If the issue persists, consider reporting it through the feedback option in Edge, as it may be a bug or a recent change in the voice settings affecting the pronunciation of Pinyin.

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References:

• SSML phonetic alphabets