IPA Reader

This is a tool for reading International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation aloud.

It makes it easy to actually hear how words are pronounced based on their phonetic spelling, without having to look up each character in the IPA chart and string the sounds together yourself.

For example, "budgerigar" (AKA the common parakeet) can be pronounced according to its IPA notation /ˈbʌdʒərɪɡɑːr/.

How Do You Use It?

Find a word you would like to hear pronounced, grab the IPA notation (if you don't already have it, Wiktionary is a great place to look), toss it in the form, and hit the "Read" button.

For example, /ˈpɪdʒən/ will be read as "pigeon."

How Does It Work?

I had fun making this, so I wrote about how it was built here!

Basically, the current version structures a request to Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service, then retrieves and plays the resulting generated audio.

(This also means that pronunciation is constrained by which phonemes Polly does or does not support; details about specific phonemes can be found in their documentation of supported phonemes.)

Who Am I?

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Pigeon icon