Pronunciation Lexicon Specification The Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) is a W3C Recommendation, which is designed to enable interoperable specification of pronunciation information for both speech recognition and speech synthesis 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. ==Usage==
Here is an example PLS document:
which could be used to improve TTS as shown in the following SSML 1.0 document:
but also to improve ASR in the following SRGS 1.0 grammar: