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Please see Azure Cognitive Services for Speech documentation for the latest supported speech solutions.

Suprasegmentals (Microsoft.Speech)

This is a listing and cross reference of the suprasegmental phones that are used by the three phonetic alphabets that Microsoft.Speech supports. See Phonetic Alphabet Reference (Microsoft.Speech).

The table columns contain the following information:

  • UPS. The phone label specified in Microsoft’s Universal Phone Set (UPS).

  • IPA. The phone label specified in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) phone set.

  • Unicode. The Unicode value from the IPA phone set.

  • SAPI ID. The Speech API (SAPI) phone ID, which in most cases is the Unicode value.

  • IPA Description. This column describes the features of the phone. See the Glossary of Phonetic Terms (Microsoft.Speech) for more information about the features of phones.

  • X-SAMPA. The equivalent phone in X-SAMPA for reference.

  • SAPI Equivalent. The equivalent SAPI label, if applicable.

Suprasegmental Phones

Suprasegmentals describe the features of a language above the level of individual consonants and vowels, such as prosody, tone, length, and stress.

The first set of suprasegmental symbols, up to and including “linking”, map directly to the IPA suprasegmental set and therefore have the IPA Unicode value as the SAPI phone ID. This set includes length diacritics for long, half-long, and extra-short. Length is often used phonemically, so length markers could also belong in the diacritics table. For this reason they are given the lower case label format of a diacritic.

The remaining suprasegmental symbols are used in UPS to describe intonation contours in text-to-speech markup (SSML prompt documents). These UPS symbols were formed by prefixing the original SAPI labels with an underscore. This makes them more easily identifiable as a class and removes any ambiguity with other IPA symbols. For example the old SAPI symbol ‘!’ sentence terminator is the IPA symbol for an alveolar click.

UPS

IPA

Unicode

SAPI ID

IPA Description

X-SAMPA

SAPI Equivalent

S1

ˈ

U+02C8

02C8

Primary stress

"

1

S2

ˌ

U+02CC

02CC

Secondary stress

%

2

.

.

U+002E

002E

Syllable break

_|

|

U+007C

007C

Minor (foot) group

_||

‖

U+2016

2016

Major (intonation) group

lng

ː

U+02D0

02D0

Long

:

hlg

ˑ

U+02D1

02D1

Half-long

:\

xsh

˘

U+02D8

02D8

Extra-short

_X

_^

U+203F

203F

linking (absence of a break)

-\

_!

0001

Intonation - exclamation

! Sentence terminator (exclamation mark)

_&

0002

Intonation - continue

& Word boundary

_,

0003

intonation - incompletion rise

, Sentence terminator (comma)

_s

0004

Silence

_ Silence (underscore)

_.

U+2198

2198

Intonation – fall

. Sentence terminator (period)

_?

U+2197

2197

Intonation - question rise

? Sentence terminator (question mark)