Custom Pronunciation

For uncommon words, such as unique brand names or product names, Rime’s speech synthesis model may not always pronounce them correctly out of the box.

While the Rime team can add new words to the dictionary within around 24 hours, if you want to specify the pronunciation yourself, you can input a custom pronunciation string within curly brackets.

Tools exist both to check the dictionary coverage and to generate a custom pronunciation string.

Custom pronunciations use Rime’s phonetic alphabet (detailed below), which is inspired by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For example the word custom would be represented as {k1Ast0xm}. This even works for made-up words, like gorbulets, which would be {g1orby0ul2Ets}.

Audio Clip	Sentence
	actually, {g1orby0ul2Ets} is a word i just made up.

Note: When making an API request, you must set phonemizeBetweenBrackets to true. The request would look like this:

Custom Pronunciation Example

{
	"text": "actually, {g1orby0ul2Ets} is a word i just made up.",
    "speaker": "peak",
    "modelId": "mistv2",
    "phonemizeBetweenBrackets": true
}

Check Coverage

The Coverage tool is available in the Rime dashboard: rime.ai/dashboard/coverage. You can also check coverage via the API.

You can check to see if any word or list of words is included in the Rime dictionary before generating a custom pronunciation.

Get Pronunciation

The Pronunciation tool is available in the Rime dashboard: rime.ai/dashboard/pronunciation.

To generate a custom pronunciation, all you have to do is spell and record yourself speaking the word, then click GENERATE.

When you click GENERATE, you’ll send your recording to Rime’s proprietary pronunciation model, which will return a pronunciation string using Rime’s phonetic alphabet. You can then listen to the word spoken by any of Rime’s voices and make any edits to the generated pronunciation.

Rime’s Phonetic Alphabet

Below is a guide to Rime’s phonetic alphabet and how to input syllabic stress.

Vowels

symbol	use in an english word
@	bat
a	hot
A	butt
W	about
x	comma
Y	bite
E	bet
R	bird, foreword
e	bait
I	bit
i	beat
o	boat
O	boy
U	book
u	boot
N	button

Consonants

symbol	use in an english word
b	buy
C	China
d	die
D	thy
f	fight
g	guy
h	high
J	jive
k	kite
l	lie
m	my
n	nigh
G	sing
p	pie
r	rye
s	sigh
S	shy
t	tie
T	thigh
v	vie
w	wise
y	yacht
z	zoo
Z	pleasure

Stress

For primary stress, put 1 before the relevant vowel. For example, comma would be {k1am0x}

For seconadary stress, put 2 in front of the relevant vowel. For example, auctioneer would be {2akS0In1ir}

All other vowels shoud have a 0 in front of them.