Your words

Phonema

See every word, as it’s really said.

Turns English text into IPA — broad for everyone, narrow with Pro — syllable by syllable, and exports it.

Not released — in testing here.

Phonema is at version 0.28.0, in testing; its service is in testing on our own devices and not public yet, so there is no download on this page. Free: broad IPA, PDFs, subtitles in broad IPA and How hard is this?. Phonema Pro, coming: narrow IPA, connected speech, the audio export and IPA for the family’s other apps.

Broad

the transcription a dictionary gives

callˈkɑl ing·ɪŋ

Narrow Pro

what the mouth actually does

callˈkʰɑl ing·ɪŋ
One word, both ways: spelling syllables over IPA syllables, the stressed syllable in color, the syllable break kept. Narrow adds the puff of air after the k that English speakers make without noticing — the ʰ. That difference is the whole of what Phonema is for.

Today 0.22.0 · in testing

  • Text + IPA
  • IPA only
  • Playlists/The water 2026-10-12/
  • 01 - The water is cold.mp3
  • 01 - The water is cold.srt
  • Whole text.mp3
  • Whole text.srt
  • playlist.m3u8
  • reel.mp4
Left: the PDF, every word over its IPA or the whole text in IPA, in your stress style. Right: the folder Audio + subtitles writes for VLC — a sentence and its IPA under each clip.

What the ʰ is

Narrow IPA writes what your mouth does without your noticing. Here is one of its marks, measured.

  • pike ˈpʰaɪk narrow

    85 ms

    A puff of breath before the voice starts: that is the ʰ.

  • spite ˈspaɪt

    15 ms

    After s, hardly a puff: the voice starts almost at once.

Hold a candle, or a strip of paper, in front of your lips. Pike bends the flame; spite hardly moves it. The amber stretch is the time from the p’s release to the voice — breath you can feel on the back of your hand, and the ʰ that Phonema’s narrow notation writes. Both words said by clb (a woman). Across the four voices, p, t and k at the start of a stressed word waited a median 62–87 ms for the voice (1,614 words); after s, 16–29 ms (430). Read speech, CMU ARCTIC.

What it does

Paste any English text and Phonema writes how it is said in American English, in the International Phonetic Alphabet: spelling syllables over IPA syllables, stress marked, line by line. Choose how much detail you want — the broad transcription a dictionary gives, free, or the narrow one that shows what the mouth actually does, with Phonema Pro — and take it away as a PDF you can print or teach from.

Phonema is where the basic IPA of the other apps stops: it begins with the narrow notation, weak forms and linking, and everything past that line is its job.

What it can do

Your data

No account, no ads, no analytics. Phonema does have a server, because turning text into IPA happens there: the text you ask about travels to the Phonema service, is answered, and is not stored. Your settings and your own words stay on the phone unless you copy them to your own Google Drive, a file on the phone, or another of your devices over your own Wi-Fi.

Privacy policy · Terms of use

Get it

Phonema for Android. Transcription needs a connection to the Phonema service.
Package com.neurophonetics.phonema

Google Play — not published yet

Questions or a problem:

The rest of the family

Separate apps, each doing one job. None of them needs another — they simply go well together.