Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound that can be used to form contrasts between utterances. The <phoneme> tag allows the user to specify pronunciations explicitly in the input text. The phoneme element specifies pronunciation for the contained text of any given VoiceXML application. Its attributes include alphabet, which specifies the phonetic alphabet to use. It also specifies ph, which is required, and specifies the phonetic string using the selected phonetic alphabet. The alphabet attribute is passed directly to the TTS engine. Typically, TTS engines only support the DARPA phonetic alphabet. The <phoneme> tag is a new element to VoiceXML 2.0. A phoneme element may be empty, but application code will be easier to understand and maintain if the element contains human-readable text that details a specified phoneme string.

Related links

• VoiceXML - Plum IVR Glossary
• Application - Plum IVR Glossary