Custom pronunciation

Specify pronunciations for uncommon words in Mist family synthesis using Rime’s phonetic alphabet.

Custom pronunciation is supported by Mist and Mist v2 only. It is not yet supported on Mist v3.

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 in about a week (contact us if you need faster turnaround or have an SLA), 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, 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.

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

Before writing a custom pronunciation by hand, check whether the word is already in Rime’s dictionary using the Check Coverage tool. You can also check coverage via the API.

For the full walkthrough — uploading word lists, listening to predicted pronunciations, and requesting dictionary additions — see Check coverage.

Get pronunciation

If the word is uncovered, the Pronunciation tool in the dashboard generates a phonetic string for you. Type the word, record yourself saying it, click Generate, and the tool returns a string in the Rime phonetic alphabet that you can paste into your TTS request inside {}.

For the full walkthrough, see Generating a pronunciation string.

The Rime phonetic alphabet

The Rime phonetic alphabet is inspired by IPA and covers vowels, consonants, and syllabic stress. The full symbol reference lives on its own page: Rime phonetic alphabet.