Alternate Pronounciation for Chinese Characters

Occasionally, TTS engines will mispronounce a Chinese character. This is rare for Mandarin or in a complete sentence, but can still happen in Cantonese, or if you have a character by itself. To correct this, we can use an alternate pronounciation field.

You'll need to be familiar with Note Types and how to modify them. You can follow this tutorial on Note Types if required.

In the above note, the TTS engine is not able to pronounce 抹手 correctly (moot instead of mutt). Instead, we ask it to pronounce 蜜手, and then the sound is correct. You'll need to try with different characters which have the same pronunciation. Once we've added the field, we can configure HyperTTS presets. We don't alter the original character, so while reviewing, we are still correctly showing the original characters. The Alternate field is used only for sound generation.

Click the gear icon to configure Preset Rules.

Our main preset, Cantonese HiuMaan will generate audio from the Chinese field. It is Enabled meaning it will be used by default when we generate audio for this note type. The second preset, Cantonese HiuMaan Alternate will generate audio from the Chinese-Alternate-Pronunciation field. The Enabled checkbox is not checked, so the preset won't run by default. We can run it manually by clicking the Run button when required, when we encounter a word or sentence which is not pronounced correctly.