Pronunciation Lexicon Specification

A full description of the W3C Recommendation for Pronunciation Lexicon Specification can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/pronunciation-lexicon/.

The Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) is designed to enable interoperable specification of pronunciation information for both ASR and TTS engines within voice browsing applications. The language is intended to be easy to use by developers while supporting the accurate specification of pronunciation information for international use.

The language allows one or more pronunciations for a word or phrase to be specified using a standard pronunciation alphabet or if necessary using vendor specific alphabets. Pronunciations are grouped together into a PLS document which may be referenced from other markup languages, such as the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification [SRGS] and the Speech Synthesis Markup Language [SSML].