Cannot use IPA phonemes with Google Home SSML

Question

Alexa has the capability to speak phonetically using the IPA phonemes...example below

<speak>
    You say, <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="pɪˈkɑːn">pecan</phoneme>. 
    I say, <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="ˈpi.kæn">pecan</phoneme>.
</speak>

I cant see this support anywhere in Google Home..anyone know if Googles SSML supports this?

Answer 1

Unfortunately it looks like Google Assistant does not support this tag yet. I also find this frustrating because my responses have a lot of names in them which are being read out incorrectly.

Currently the documentation for Google's SSML is defined here: https://developers.google.com/actions/reference/ssml

See the following caveat on this page:

Note that not all of the elements and options described in the W3 SSML specification are currently supported by the Actions on Google platform. This page details which elements and options are available for your application. The W3 reference links provided below may be helpful for additional context and examples.

Unfortunately, there is no mention of "phoneme" support.

However Google does provide some additional features not in the standard SSML reference such as the tag (parallel audio responses).

One way you can work around this issue is to make use of the SUB tag. You can substitute an alias phrase to replace the content inside the tag.

An example of pronouncing Daniel Ricciardo's name as he does:-

<speak>Daniel <sub alias=\"Rickardo\">Ricciardo</sub></speak>

See the following link for more information: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/speech-synthesis-markup-language-ssml-reference.html#sub