I'm working on a simple app aimed at teachers, parents, and primary school students to help improve pronunciation skills. I'm searching for a free API that provides IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) phonetic transcriptions specifically for British English. For instance, when I input the word "home," the expected output should be "/həʊm/". I only need a small usage quota since the app is intended for kids below the B2 level. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
3 Answers
You might want to check out the Wiktionary API. It's a useful resource that can give you access to phonetic transcriptions for many words.
I've had some success with using Google's translation services in the past, though it can be a bit hit or miss for phonetic outputs. For your needs, look into using Lama Scout; you can set it up to transcribe words into IPA just by making an LLM call. If you're into using Python, you should also explore some libraries like 'eng-to-ipa' or 'text2ipa' on PyPI. These can be a part of your solution without incurring costs if you stick to open-source models.
There's an interesting project I found that translates text into IPA using a JS app. It's been mainly focused on French and German pronunciation. You can check out how they use AWS Polly to generate voice outputs from IPA transcriptions. You might find their approach worth exploring!
Do you have any resources or links for the IPA translation characters, so I could implement it myself?