Japanese TTS

[lang.svv]

Is there a way to instruct how TTS pronounces Japanese words or any tricks of making pronunciation of Japanese words more accurate?

I tried both Siri and Amazon Polly Japanese TTS, but many words are not pronounced correctly; for example, it pronounces "家" as "うち", but I would like the pronunciation to be "いえ"; if I put the Hiragana in [ ] or { } to force the pronunciation, sometimes the pitch accent is wrong. Another example is 世界 (せかい); the correct pitch accent is せꜜかい, but Amazon Polly pronounces it as せかꜜい. Is there any way to specifically indicate pitch accent in TTS pronunciation?

[Ernie]

Hi. I'm not familiar with this, but take a look at the Amazon Polly examples below. See if that helps. You can put this text as-is into your Text columns.

Japanese uses Yomigana and Pronunciation Kana.
Yomigana

名前は<phoneme alphabet="x-amazon-yomigana" ph="ひろかず">浩一</phoneme>です。
名前は<phoneme alphabet="x-amazon-yomigana" ph="ヒロカズ">浩一</phoneme>です。
名前は<phoneme alphabet="x-amazon-yomigana" ph="Hirokazu">浩一</phoneme>です。

Pronunciation Kana

名前は<phoneme alphabet="x-amazon-pron-kana" ph="ヒロ'カズ">浩一</phoneme>です。


I think these are all different ways to do that same thing. The app won't normally show the text in the HTML tags, but it would be used when creating the Amazon Polly sounds.
Note that you'll need to delete existing sounds before you can redownload, as the app will only create new sounds that are missing. There is a button the TTS screen to delete existing TTS files for Amazon.