How to convert text into ipa?

Question

I want to convert some text into ipa to make sure the pronunciation will always be the same on all tts engines.

I didn't find a good way to do that, especially I need this for german. I hoped for a service from a big player like Google, because of their advanced tts, but I didn't find one.

Does someone know a good tool / api / plugin for that?

Answer 1

Check out espeak-ng, which does IPA output with the -x flag. There's also a couple of related libraries out there based on espeak/espeak-ng if you don't want to just use the CLI.

Also, Amazon Polly allows output of "visimes" (see Speech Marks, which in theory you could translate back into IPA (they have a lookup table).