[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Lghtnup

Is there a way to code, [...] phonetic pronunciation into and epub file?

See the discussion in:

• 2021: "Telling a text-to-speech reader how to pronounce things?"

There's 2 methods:

• CSS Speech
• SSML

but, like Kovid said, the support on actual devices is effectively nonexistent.

Originally Posted by Lghtnup

I'm working on a book with a character named Sethe (Seth-uh), and Calibre's reader just spells out the word with no attempt to pronounce it.

Within the past few years, there's been some work on more specialized tools for audiobook generation.

You can feed a list of words + pronunciations, then regenerate the final audio files... but it's more something at the Amazon/Microsoft/Google paid Text-to-Speech level.

I first found out about that in this podcast interview:

• The Creative Penn: "Auto-Narrated Audiobooks With Ryan Dingler From Google Play Books" (August 2022)

(He speaks about it ~20 mins in.)

But to have pronunciations you can mark up in your EPUB files and have it work well, in the current day... no.

Originally Posted by nqk

I wonder if that is wrapped in <span lang="abc"> tag, will the engine read it the "right" way?

Yes, some TTS engines already support multi-language markup. (Most won't though, but some do!)

And, by marking your HTML languages properly TODAY, there's already lots of other advantages too!

See my list of benefits:

• 2022: "<i>, <em> or <span> for italics ?"

and how to mark the HTML lang + xml:lang:

• 2023: "Search for All French Words in English Book?"

So if you used this HTML:

<p>“I eat tacos?”</p>
<p><span class="spanish" lang="es" xml:lang="es">“¿Como tacos?”</span></p>

The 1st "tacos" would be spoken in English.

The 2nd "tacos" would be spoken in Spanish.