Hi! Got an English text and want to see how to pronounce it? This online converter of English text to IPA phonetic transcription will translate your English text into its phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Paste or type your English text in the text field above and click “Show transcription” button (or use [Ctrl+Enter] shortcut from the text input area).
Features:
- Choose between British and American* pronunciation. When British option is selected the [r] sound at the end of the word is only voiced if followed by a vowel, which follows British phonetic convention.
- The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols used.
- The structure of the text and sentences in it (line breaks, punctuation marks, etc.) is preserved in phonetic transcription output making it easier to read.
- An option to vary pronunciation depending on whether words are in stressed or weak position in the sentence, as in connected speech (checkbox “Show weak forms”). Weak forms are italicized in the output.
- Words in CAPS are interpreted as acronyms if the word is not found in the database. Acronym transcriptions will be shown with hyphens between letters.
- In addition to commonly used vocabulary the database contains a very substantial amount of place names (including names of countries, their capitals, US states, UK counties), nationalities and popular names.
- You can output the text and its phonetic transcription along each other side-by-side or line-by-line to make back-reference to the original text easier. Just tick the appropriate checkbox in the input form.
- Where a word has a number of different pronunciations (highlighted in blue in the output) you can select the one that agrees with the context by clicking on it. To see a popup with a list of possible pronunciations move your mouse cursor over the word.
Note that different pronunciations of one word may have different meanings or may represent variations in pronunciation with the same meaning. If unsure which pronunciation is relevant in your particular case, consult a dictionary. - The dictionary database is regularly amended with most popular missing words (shown in red in the output).
- The text can be read out loud in browsers with speech synthesis support (Safari, Chrome).
*) American transcriptions are based on the open Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary.
We encourage students of linguistics/phonetics to do their own work during their assignments and remind them that submitting transcriptions produced by this website for academic credit is a breach of academic integrity.
NB: Audio playback!
The speech playback feature is heavily dependant on the OS/browser combination you use. If you want your comments about audio quality to be helpful, please, mention your OS and browser (ideally with versions).
At the moment we recommend Chrome for full audio playback functionality, which includes
Safari dev team has been progressively destroying its in-browser voice support over the last few years and has other TTS implementation issues they don’t seem to be willing to address. There’s little we can do about it at the moment, unfortunately.
Let us know how Audio playback works for you by replying to this comment, especially if you use less common OS/browsers. Thanks!
I’m on Firefox/Windows, and it’s not working for me.
Explain me all of verbal times
Can I use phophoneticsnscription for business purposes?
In what way? If you are just preparing original course materials, it is good.
I am an English teacher for adults with a heavy accent. I use your service to transcribe 700-word documents to Phoneme characters so the students can read aloud and detect mispronunciation; the classes are online and paid for by the student. The text used is from the public domain material. I request permission to use your services. I will acknowledge “tophonetics.com” in each document I publish. Students are recommended to use “tophonetics.com” for their homework transcriptions.
It’s not a problem. We just ask that you use the service sensibly when transcribing large amount of text as to not overload the server.
How can we copy the transcription and paste it somewhere else. Thank you!
https://tophonetics.com/faq/#copy
Add xhosa language, whose transcription is /kɔ:sə/
Bona valde! Propositum tuum mihi placet!
despite ticking the box for weak forms the converter only appears to provide straight transcription. using chrome browser
Do you have the same thing for those of us learning French please?
А почему он выдаёт транскрипцию слова love как лв
Мне выдает “лав”. Скриншот?
Hello, I’m Japanese, these are helpful for my studies, thank you.
I’m amazed that this claims to be IPA. I’ve just put in ‘men’ which should then be the vowel sound which looks like a regular ‘e’ but it’s come up with a curly one! That’s not British IPA!
Yes, we unashamedly claim it to be IPA since /ɛ/ is a very regular IPA character, the rest is a matter of convention.
This might be of interest too.