AI engineering glossary · Generative media multimodal
What is phoneme?
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a language that can change a word's meaning. Speech systems often model phonemes instead of letters because pronunciation is more regular there. Speech models often work with phonemes rather than letters because pronunciation is more regular there, which helps both recognition and synthesis.
Phoneme: an example
The words 'pat' and 'bat' differ by one phoneme, /p/ versus /b/.
Related terms
- Grapheme-to-phoneme
- Acoustic model
- Automatic speech recognition
More Generative media multimodal terms
- Pix2Pix
- Projector layer
- Prosody
- PSNR
- Q-Former
- Realtime speech interaction
- Reparameterisation trick
- Residual vector quantisation
Where you learn it
Phoneme is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.