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SAPI 5.4 documentation mentions that English, Chinese, German, Spanish, French, and Japanese languages (are able to) use the SAPI phone set. However the SAPI 5.4 documentation includes phoneme sets for only (American) English, Chinese, and Japanese.

Are specific phone sets available for the other languages supported by SAPI? I get the impression based on the (very brief) notes about the German phone set that the English set may be used to derive pronunciations for non-Japanese and non-Chinese words. If this is true than it is stated in a rather obscure manner, so hopefully folks can provide some confirmation here. Thanks!

Exergist
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    Sure. The IPA phonemes help to isolate you from language differences. Which works well enough for European languages, minus the noted German quirk, and noting that the exact pronunciation might not be the same for every language. The installed voice adapts as necessary. But not for the East Asian languages, too different, they need their own (large) phoneme sets. – Hans Passant May 20 '19 at 19:13
  • Thanks for the feedback Hans! Did you mean SAPI instead of IPA? – Exergist May 20 '19 at 23:04
  • No, the IPA standard defines phonemes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet – Hans Passant May 20 '19 at 23:12
  • Ah perfect, thanks for the clarification – Exergist May 21 '19 at 03:26
  • I had the same problem than you. I was looking for other phoneme sets, but I didn't found any. So I decided to write my own set. I only did it for the French language. I based myself on the American English phoneme representation, then I searched for others on my own. – georges619 May 21 '19 at 06:23
  • @georges619 by chance is this set you built publicly available for reference? What else did you find? I have an app that can manipulate the speech dictionary on a large scale and I'm thinking about broadening the scope beyond American English. – Exergist May 21 '19 at 16:46
  • Sorry, I haven't published it. I use these phonemes in an XML file which is used as a dictionary. In this dictionary, I use the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (also known as SSML). How do you use the phonemes? – georges619 May 22 '19 at 06:07
  • For rapidly modifying the Windows Speech Dictionary on a small-large scale, since SAPI is the only interface that exposes methods for touching the dictionary. – Exergist May 22 '19 at 06:50
  • Have you tried modifying the Windows Speech Dictionary? I have, and I was disappointed because it can't be modified manually. Once you touch its content, it is erased and set to default. That's why I implemented an XML file. – georges619 May 22 '19 at 09:58
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    @georges619 this would be a good starting point ==> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49783718/sapi-symbol-usage-for-speech-dictionary-input – Exergist May 22 '19 at 13:10

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