Rime phonetic alphabet

Reference for Rime’s phonetic alphabet used to specify custom pronunciations on Mist v1 and Mist v2.

Custom pronunciation is supported on Mist v1 and v2 only. Coda, Arcana, and Mist v3 do not yet support phonemizeBetweenBrackets.

Rime uses its own phonetic alphabet, inspired by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), to let you specify exactly how a word should sound. You provide a phonetic string inside curly brackets and set phonemizeBetweenBrackets: true on the request. For the full request mechanic, see Custom pronunciation.

For example, the word custom is represented as {k1Ast0xm}. Even made-up words work — gorbulets becomes {g1orby0ul2Ets}.

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 is {k1am0x}.

For secondary stress, put 2 in front of the relevant vowel. For example, auctioneer is {2akS0In1ir}.

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

Generating a string automatically

You don’t have to compose phonetic strings symbol by symbol. Post a recording of the word to the Phonemize API and it returns a transcription in this alphabet, stress markers included:

curl -X POST https://optimize.rime.ai/phonemize \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer $RIME_API_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: audio/wav" \
     --data-binary @speech.wav
# => {"audioId": "...", "phonemeString": "h0El1o !", "authed": 1}

Strip any trailing punctuation token from phonemeString, then use the symbol tables above to fine-tune the result if a vowel or stress placement isn’t quite right.

Related

• Custom pronunciation — how to use phonetic strings in API requests
• Pronunciation control — overview of checking coverage, custom pronunciations, and dictionary additions
• Coverage API — check whether words are in Rime’s dictionary before writing a custom pronunciation
• Phonemize API — generate a phonetic string from an audio recording of the word