How to use IPA to support Tones in Chinese?

Question

How to use IPA to support Tones in Chinese?

cshijiel opened this issue 3 years ago · 2 comments

<speak version="1.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/synthesis" xml:lang="zh-CN">
    <voice name="zh-CN-XiaoxiaoNeural" style="newscast">
        <phoneme alphabet="sapi" ph="fen 2 ci 4">分词</phoneme>。
        <phoneme alphabet="sapi" ph="niu 4 bi 2">牛逼</phoneme>。
        <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="ɚ˥">耳</phoneme>。。。
    </voice>
</speak>

I tried to use this description, but failed.

Answer 1 · 2021-12-20T11:02:31.000Z

SAPI phone can work with tones.

Answer 2 · 2021-12-22T04:01:05.000Z

@cshijiel IPA support Chinese tones.
Here I list the IPA tone levels (IPA unicode/decimal and symbol) supported by Microsoft TTS.

tone level 1: 783 ̏
tone level 2: 768 ̀
tone level 3: 772 ̄
tone level 4: 769 ́
tone level 5: 779 ̋

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_letter, it shows how to use tone with IPA for Chinese.
E.g. ph='nà̏́' to describe the 3rd tone which is the same as pinyin 'na 3'.

But I still suggest you to use SAPI phones as its much easier to use.