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Try it yourself ... before buying

With years of research behind it, E-Speech name pronunciation software is the most accurate system available today for pronouncing names of people in the United States.

Our software is based on intelligent letter-to-phoneme rules so that it will pronounce any name. In addition, for many thousands of names, we have researched the most common pronunciations in the United States, so that the pronunciations can be considered verified. In addition, for nearly a hundred thousand names, we have confirmed that the pronunciation produced by our system is a pronunciation that would be produced by an intelligent, educated native speaker of American English.

Our software will give you unparalleled name pronunciation accuracy for any application:

• speech recognition
• the front-end for any speech synthesizer
• coaching agents in outbound call centers on how to pronounce names of people or places
• brand-naming or word searching: it can help identify what words or names sound like other words or names

The software translates input in English orthography into a phonological representation, indicating phonemes, word-stress, syllable boundaries, word and phrase boundaries, and optionally, intonation and phrase-stress.

Our software can be used with speech recognition and with text-to-speech, and it supports all popular phonetic alphabets:

• IPA
• ARPAbet
• CPA
• SAMPA
• HARK
• "Newspaper" phonetics, for call center agents and people who would not be expected to learn a phonetic alphabet

If you input... Our system outputs.... Name IPA phonetics Newspaper phonetics    (other alphabets available) Gerhardt     'geɪr ˌhɑ:rt GAIR-hart Daphne 'dæf ni: DAFF-nee Xingxing ˌʃɪŋ 'ʃɪŋ shing-SHING Ravi 'ræ vi: RAV-vee Lachapelle     lɑ: ʃə 'pel lah-shuh-PEHL Murtagh 'mɚ ˌtɔ: MURR-taw Gnanadesikan næ nɪ 'de sɪ kən nan-nid-DEH-si-kuhn Liang li: 'æŋ lee-ANG Dziuba 'ʤu: bə JOO-buh Balbuena bæl 'bweɪ nə bal-BWAY-nuh Okundaye ˌoʊ ku:n 'dɑ: jeɪ oh-koon-DAH-yay

In addition, our software provides multiple pronunciations for many names that have more than one possible pronunciation. For example, "Weinstein" can be pronounced as "WINE stine" or "WINE steen," "Migliore" may be pronounced as "mig lee OR", "mig lee OR ee", "mig lee OR ay", "mil YORE", "mil YORE ee", or "mil YORE ay," and "Cai" can be pronounced as "TSY" or "CHY" or "SY". This feature is important for speech recognition applications, since they need to link all the pronunciations to the same name.

Our letter-to-phoneme software can be used real-time during speech recognition/synthesis transaction processing or off-line to build pronunciation dictionaries that can be incorporated into your ASR or synthesis software. The software is available as part of the E-Speech text-to-speech system or as a standalone system. It runs on Win95/98/NT/2000/XP/Vista/Windows7 and various Unix systems, including Linux, and is easy to integrate with applications. The standalone version is available as a command-line executable or as a library/DLL containing C-callable functions. We welcome customization: we are happy to tailor our software to your specific needs.