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I'm writing a computer program which requires some of this functionality at one point, so I wanted to get into a (better-written) code and have a look, to get some inspiration. Are there any good ones out there?

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    Your question seems to be too broad as there are many possible answer to it. Consider adding some details on what tools have you tried so far and why aren't they "good" for your needs. Otherwise the question may be downvoted and/or closed.
    – Be Brave Be Like Ukraine
    Oct 4, 2013 at 9:21
  • I haven't tried any yet, I was just wondering if there were any open source programs anyone knew of that I could take a look at. Just a simple English to IPA transcriber. Also, re-read my original comment, when I wrote (better-written) I merely meant the poor code that I will inevitably end up writing. - Basically I want to work out the best (or simplest) coding method for converting standard English text to any phonetic alphabet.
    – Bevil
    Oct 4, 2013 at 9:56
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    This is one of the steps in most "text to speech" systems, which in turn is one of the parts of "speech synthesis". The ones that I have seen some part of the workings of each use their own custom ASCII-based "phonetic alphabet" rather than IPA. But there could well be ones that use IPA or some other scheme that is also used by linguists.
    – hippietrail
    Oct 4, 2013 at 12:41

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Have you tried WikSpeak? It is a GUI-based tool for converting English texts into their IPA transcriptions. Since it is open source, it should be no problem to extract and examine the functionality that is relevant to your project.

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  • It only works for individual words, not connected text. So you can only get fully-pronounced root words. And it can't distinguish homophones (lead and led get identical results), nor variants (roof, hoof, and boot all have /u:/, not /ʊ/).
    – jlawler
    Apr 18, 2014 at 20:23
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You're probably not still wanting answers, but I'll add this for posterity. espeak is a command line speech synthesis program. It outputs to various formats (including IPA), and has various different voices. For instance, English has voices en, en-us, en-sc (Scottish), en-n (Northern English), en-rp and en-wm (West Midlands). There are many other languages, too.

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