SSML supports two phonetic alphabets: the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and the IBM TTS phonetic alphabet.
The optional alphabet attribute of the phoneme element specifies the phonetic alphabet. If the alphabet is not specified, the default IBM TTS phonetic alphabet is used.
The following example shows the US English phonetic pronunciation of "tomato" using the IPA:
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="təˈmeɪ.ɾʊ"> tomato </phoneme>
The following example shows the pronunciation of "tomato" using the character codes for the IPA symbols. If you have encoding to support the IPA symbols, you can these symbols instead:
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="təˈmeɪ.ɾoʊ"> tomato </phoneme>
For more information about the IPA, refer to: http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/index.html.
The following example shows the US English phonetic pronunciation of "tomato" using the IBM TTS phonetic alphabet:
<phoneme alphabet="ibm" ph=".0tx.1me.0Fo"> tomato </phoneme>
The pronunciation of "tomato" is given in a notation called Symbolic Phonetic Representation (SPR). The SPR for a word is the phonetic spelling used by IBM TTS to represent the pronunciation of a word. An SPR represents the sounds of a word, how these sounds are divided into syllables, and which syllables receive stress.
For more information about SPRs, including tables of SPRs for several languages, see Introduction to symbolic phonetic representations in this guide.