title: Google Cloud Text to Speech (TTS) - Can't Get Phonemes to Work
body: <p>I'm using Google's example for phoneme implementation as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="t&amp;#x259;mei&amp;#x325;&amp;#x27E;ou&amp;#x325;"&gt; tomato &lt;/phoneme&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm using Postman to send as POST requests to the <a href="https://texttospeech.googleapis.com/v1/text" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://texttospeech.googleapis.com/v1/text</a> endpoint.</p>
  
  <p>I notice that if I alter the word "tomato" but keep the original value for "ph", the word "tomato" is still completely returned for the voice audio. I would have expected the voice audio to return "To" sound only.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="t&amp;#x259;"&gt; tomato &lt;/phoneme&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When sending POST request in JSON format via Postman, I always escape the quotation marks to avoid JSON parsing errors:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{
    "audioConfig":{
      "audioEncoding":"LINEAR16",
      "volumeGainDb":"16",
      "pitch": 0,
      "speakingRate": 1
    },
    "input":{
      "ssml":"&lt;speak&gt;&lt;phoneme alphabet=\"ipa\" ph=\"t&amp;#x259;\"&gt; tomato &lt;/phoneme&gt;&lt;/speak&gt;" 
    },
    "voice":{
      "languageCode":"en-US",
      "name":"en-US-Wavenet-F",
      "ssmlGender":"FEMALE"
    }
  
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Anyone know why Phonemes don't appear to be working?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance.</p>