Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest sound unit that distinguishes words in a language — English has roughly 44, spanning sounds like /p/ vs /b/.

Phonemes are the alphabet of speech technology: pronunciation lexicons, forced alignment and TTS front-ends all operate on them. Alignment at the phoneme level is what enables precise lip-sync and dubbing.

Related terms

Forced alignmentForced alignment is the process of taking an existing transcript and an audio recording and computing exactly … ProsodyProsody is the melody of speech — pitch movement, rhythm, stress and pauses — carrying meaning beyond the word…