Quite simply this is Google Translate for phonetics. Just type (or copy and paste) text into the left box, click transcribe at the top and the English IPA translation will appear on the right-hand side. Without a doubt, a very useful tool! Phonetizer is a lightweight software application built specifically for helping you generate the phonetic transcription for English texts. The tool is able to automatically create the IPA.
EasyAlign: phonetic alignment with Praat
EasyAlign is a user-friendly automatic phonetic alignment tool forcontinuous speech under Praat. It is possible to align speech from anorthographic or phonetic transcription. It requires a few minor manualsteps and the result is a multi-level annotation within a TextGridcomposed of phonetic, syllabic, lexical and utterance tiers as below.
EasyAlign is available for Windows only and is not compatible with Macs yet. Mac users are welcomed to contact me to find out how to make itpossible.
The whole process to segment a speech file is as follows: from a speech audio file and its corresponding orthographic transcription in a text file, the user has to go through 3 automatic steps; manualverifications and adjustments can be done in-between to ensure evenbetter quality. The result is a multi-tier TextGrid with phones,syllables, words and utterance segmentation as in Figure 1. Moreprecisely, these three steps are:
- macro-segmentation at utterance level (makes ortho tier)
- grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (makes phono tier)
- phone segmentation (make words,syll,phones tiers)
Download
- EasyAlign.exe version - 04.2012
Tutorials
- Tutorial EasyAlign.pdf - 07.05.2010 (11 pages)
Publications
- EasyAlign: an automatic phonetic alignment tool under Praat - Interspeech 2011(4 pages)
- EasyAlign Spanish 5thCFE Nov.2011
How to cite EasyAlign
J.-Ph. Goldman EasyAlign: an automatic phonetic alignment tool under Praat Proceedings of InterSpeech, September 2011 , Firenze, Italy
Available languages
| fre | eng | spa | por bra | tw min | |
| #1 utterance segmentation | |||||
| #2 phonetizer | |||||
| #3 phone segmentation |
Installation (details)
Pour installer EasyAlign sur un PC (sur lequel Praat a déjà été utilisé), il suffit d'executer le programme EasyAlignSetup.exe puis de relancer Praat afin qu'il intègre cette extension (ou plugin) dans ses menus. Concrètement, un répertoire nommé 'plugin_easyalign' est créé dans le répertoire de préférences de Praat (qui contient les fichiers buttons5.ini et preferences5.ini, regénérés à chaque fermeture de Praat). Sous Windows7, ce répertoire est généralement C:Users<votrenom>Praat . Sous Windows XP, c'est plutôt C:Documents & Settings<votrenom>Praat.
Si le système d'exploitation est installé de manière à ce que les documents soient sur un autre lecteur (comme D:), il se peut que le répertoire soit autre part. Une manière de le retrouver est d'aller dans Praat, d'ouvrir un nouveau script (Menu Praat > new praat script), puis écrire exactement cette ligne dans la nouvelle fenêtre :
printline 'preferencesDirectory$'
et d’exécuter le script d'une ligne avec la commande Run (dans les menus de cette fenêtre de script ou Ctrl-R). Le résultat est dans la fenêtre Info qui indique l'emplacement de ce répertoire. Il faut alors y désarchiver ce fichier plugin_easyalign.zip.
Au final, quel que soit le mode d'installation, il faut qu'un répertoire plugin_easyalign dans sous ce fameux repertoire de préférences Praat.
Some notes on how to add a new language
HowToAddaNewLanguageToEasyAlign.pdfplugin_rhapsodie
plugin_rhapsodie.zipI have been away from this blog for a little while now while I get to grips with the additional workload of a Masters degree on top of 25 hours of teaching a week. Still haven’t come up with a new name for the blog yet but hope that will get rolled out in the coming week as well… not that much of this is concern to any of you fine people reading this. Just thought I’d get my ‘housekeeping’ out of the way first. 🙂
I’ll be publishing a more substantial post soon on a short exam preparation exercise but in the meantime I just wanted to draw people’s attention to this website.
Quite simply this is Google Translate for phonetics. Just type (or copy and paste) text into the left box, click transcribe at the top and the English IPA translation will appear on the right-hand side. Without a doubt, a very useful tool!
If you are following Nik Peachey (and you really should be) then you have probably already seen this website recommended on his blog, Nik’s Quickshout. I just thought that I would pass along the knowledge to a few more people who might not yet be following him.
Ipa Transcription
P.S. I was at the English UK conference a couple of weekends ago, in which Nik, Luke Meddings, Sam McCarter and many others were presenting. The closing plenary was by Professor Mike McCarthy and focused on building on corpus linguistic data to help teachers and assessors understand more about what various English levels actually mean. His talk was insightful and thought-provoking as he started to map the findings onto the CEFR. It motivated me to write up this small question to learners on my learners’ blog, “Are you ready for intermediate level English?” Follow the link and have a read through. There might be a few useful questions to pose to your own students this week.