Phonemizer -- foʊnmaɪzɚ

• The phonemizer allows simple phonemization of words and texts in many languages.

• Provides both the phonemize command-line tool and the Python function phonemizer.phonemize.

• It is using four backends: espeak, espeak-mbrola, festival and segments.

  • espeak supports a lot of languages and IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) output.

  • espeak-mbrola uses the SAMPA phonetic alphabet instead of IPA but does not preserve word boundaries.

  • festival currently supports only American English. It uses a custom phoneset, but it allows tokenization at the syllable level.

  • segments is a Unicode tokenizer that build a phonemization from a grapheme to phoneme mapping provided as a file by the user.

Installation

You need python>=3.6. If you really need to use python2, use an older version of the phonemizer.

Dependencies

• You need to install festival, espeak-ng and mbrola on your system. On Debian/Ubuntu simply run:

    $ sudo apt-get install festival espeak-ng mbrola
  

• Alternatively you may want to use espeak instead of espeak-ng, see here for installation instructions.

• When using the espeak-mbrola backend, additional mbrola voices must be installed (see here). On Debian/Ubuntu, list the installable voices with apt search mbrola.

Phonemizer

• The simplest way is using pip:

    $ pip install phonemizer
  

• OR install it from sources with:

    $ git clone https://github.com/bootphon/phonemizer
    $ cd phonemizer
    $ python setup.py build
    $ [sudo] python setup.py install
  

  If you experiment an error such as ImportError: No module named setuptools during installation, refeer to issue 11.

Docker image

Alternatively you can run the phonemizer within docker, using the provided Dockerfile. To build the docker image, have a:

$ git clone https://github.com/bootphon/phonemizer
$ cd phonemizer
$ sudo docker build -t phonemizer .

Then run an interactive session with:

$ sudo docker run -it phonemizer /bin/bash

Command-line examples

For a complete list of available options, have a:

$ phonemize --help

See the installed backends with the --version option:

$ phonemize --version
phonemizer-2.2
available backends: espeak-ng-1.49.3, espeak-mbrola, festival-2.5.0, segments-2.0.1

Input/output exemples

• from stdin to stdout:

    $ echo "hello world" | phonemize
    həloʊ wɜːld
  

• from file to stdout

    $ echo "hello world" > hello.txt
    $ phonemize hello.txt
    həloʊ wɜːld
  

• from file to file

    $ phonemize hello.txt -o hello.phon --strip
    $ cat hello.phon
    həloʊ wɜːld
  

Backends

• The default is to use espeak us-english:

    $ echo "hello world" | phonemize
    həloʊ wɜːld
    $ echo "hello world" | phonemize -l en-us -b espeak
    həloʊ wɜːld
  

• Use festival US English instead

    $ echo "hello world" | phonemize -l en-us -b festival
    hhaxlow werld
  

• In French, using espeak and espeak-mbrola, with custom token separators (see below). espeak-mbrola does not support words separation.

    $ echo "bonjour le monde" | phonemize -b espeak -l fr-fr -p ' ' -w '/w '
    b ɔ̃ ʒ u ʁ /w l ə /w m ɔ̃ d /w
    $ echo "bonjour le monde" | phonemize -b espeak-mbrola -l mb-fr1 -p ' ' -w '/w '
    b o~ Z u R l @ m o~ d
  

• In Japanese, using segments

    $ echo 'konnichiwa' | phonemize -b segments -l japanese
    konnitʃiwa
    $ echo 'konnichiwa' | phonemize -b segments -l ./phonemizer/share/japanese.g2p
    konnitʃiwa
  

Supported languages

The exhaustive list of supported languages is available with the command phonemize --list-languages [--backend <backend>].

• Languages supported by espeak are available here.

• Languages supported by espeak-mbrola are available here. Please note that the mbrola voices are not bundled with the phonemizer and must be installed separately.

• Languages supported by festival are:

    en-us -> english-us
  

• Languages supported by the segments backend are:

    chintang  -> ./phonemizer/share/segments/chintang.g2p
    cree      -> ./phonemizer/share/segments/cree.g2p
    inuktitut -> ./phonemizer/share/segments/inuktitut.g2p
    japanese  -> ./phonemizer/share/segments/japanese.g2p
    sesotho   -> ./phonemizer/share/segments/sesotho.g2p
    yucatec   -> ./phonemizer/share/segments/yucatec.g2p
  

  Instead of a language you can also provide a file specifying a grapheme to phone mapping (see the files above for examples).

Token separators

You can specify separators for phones, syllables (festival only) and words (excepted espeak-mbrola).

$ echo "hello world" | phonemize -b festival -w ' ' -p ''
hhaxlow werld

$ echo "hello world" | phonemize -b festival -p ' ' -w ''
hh ax l ow w er l d

$ echo "hello world" | phonemize -b festival -p '-' -s '|'
hh-ax-l-|ow-| w-er-l-d-|

$ echo "hello world" | phonemize -b festival -p '-' -s '|' --strip
hh-ax-l|ow w-er-l-d

$ echo "hello world" | phonemize -b festival -p ' ' -s ';esyll ' -w ';eword '
hh ax l ;esyll ow ;esyll ;eword w er l d ;esyll ;eword

You cannot specify the same separator for several tokens (for instance a space for both phones and words):

$ echo "hello world" | phonemize -b festival -p ' ' -w ' '
fatal error: illegal separator with word=" ", syllable="" and phone=" ",
must be all differents if not empty

Punctuation

By default the punctuation is removed in the phonemized output. You can preserve it using the --preserve-punctuation option (not supported by the espeak-mbrola backend):

$ echo "hello, world!" | phonemize --strip
həloʊ wɜːld

$ echo "hello, world!" | phonemize --preserve-punctuation --strip
həloʊ, wɜːld!

Espeak specific options

• The espeak backend can output the stresses on phones:

    $ echo "hello world" | phonemize -l en-us -b espeak --with-stress
    həlˈoʊ wˈɜːld
  

• The espeak backend can switch languages during phonemization (below from French to English), use the --language-switch option to deal with it:

    $ echo "j'aime le football" | phonemize -l fr-fr -b espeak --language-switch keep-flags
    [WARNING] fount 1 utterances containing language switches on lines 1
    [WARNING] extra phones may appear in the "fr-fr" phoneset
    [WARNING] language switch flags have been kept (applying "keep-flags" policy)
    ʒɛm lə- (en)fʊtbɔːl(fr)
  
    $ echo "j'aime le football" | phonemize -l fr-fr -b espeak --language-switch remove-flags
    [WARNING] fount 1 utterances containing language switches on lines 1
    [WARNING] extra phones may appear in the "fr-fr" phoneset
    [WARNING] language switch flags have been removed (applying "remove-flags" policy)
    ʒɛm lə- fʊtbɔːl
  
    $ echo "j'aime le football" | phonemize -l fr-fr -b espeak --language-switch remove-utterance
    [WARNING] removed 1 utterances containing language switches (applying "remove-utterance" policy)
  

Licence

Copyright 2015-2020 Mathieu Bernard

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.