Introducing Magic IPA
Have you ever cringed at the mispronunciation of a key name or location in an article? Whether narrated by a human or an AI voice, getting uncommon words right can be surprisingly tricky.
From Scottish towns like Hawick (pronounced “Hoik”) to Iceland’s infamous Eyjafjallajökull volcano, the stakes are high when missteps could alienate your audience—or worse, prompt an avalanche of corrections.
For news publishers relying on AI-generated audio, this challenge becomes even more daunting. Correct pronunciation is essential to maintaining credibility and trust, and AI voices depend on accurate phonetic guidance to get it right.
Enter Magic IPA
At BeyondWords, we’re obsessed with quality. For us, that means your audience is talking about your content—not distracted by mispronunciations. Since our inception, we’ve allowed customers to adjust pronunciations using the Rules feature in the BeyondWords dashboard. But we knew we could make it even easier.
This week, we introduced Magic IPA, a new feature designed to simplify and accelerate how you correct mispronunciations.
Here’s how it works:
- Open the Editor for your article
- Find the problematic word and highlight it
- Click Add pronunciation rule
- Select IPA transcription in the Type dropdown
- Click the magic wand icon next to the Value textbox
- Suspenseful pause for a sprinkle of LLM magic…
- Preview the new pronunciation
- And finally, save your changes and regenerate the audio article
And voilà! Instant phonetic transcriptions for new or out-of-vocabulary words thanks to the power of LLMs.
Harnessing an LLM with some clever linguistic prompting, Magic IPA offers an easy, efficient way to refine your AI audio. While it’s not always perfect (hence the name), it provides a reliable starting point, saving you and your team time and effort.
Side note, we’d love to hear your thoughts about this new feature. If you encounter any issues or have feedback, please reach out to us at [email protected]