Features
One hotkey for pronunciation. And everything after it.
IPAtics starts with the IPA for any text on your screen. Then it helps you read the symbols, say the word, and remember it. Here is each part, what it does, and what it costs.
01The core
Select a word anywhere. Its pronunciation appears on top.
Highlight text in any app and press the hotkey. A small overlay opens next to your cursor with the IPA transcription and a play button, then gets out of the way. You never leave what you were reading.
- Any app on your screen
- PDFs, browsers, Word, chat apps, e-readers, subtitle players. If you can select it, IPAtics can read it.
- Language detected for you
- Auto-detect picks among 14 languages, or pin one when a word could belong to several.
- Hear it straight away
- Every result has natural text-to-speech audio, in the accent the transcription describes.
- US or UK English
- General American and Received Pronunciation are separate choices, because they are different transcriptions.
Default hotkey Alt+Q, changeable in Settings. Free: 10 transcriptions a day, up to 20 characters each. Premium: no daily cap, up to 100 characters.
02Input
Text you can’t select still gets a transcription.
Not every word arrives as selectable text. A scanned page, a video frame, a word you only heard: IPAtics has an input for each, and they all end in the same result.
- Select and press
- The everyday path: highlight, hotkey, done.
- Type or open a file
- The Editor takes anything you type or paste, and opens .txt and .docx files.
- Capture the screen
- Draw a box around text in an image, a slide or a non-selectable PDF. OCR reads it, then IPAtics transcribes it.
- Say it out loud
- Record a word you heard but can’t spell. Speech-to-text writes it down and the transcription follows.
Screen capture hotkey Alt+Shift+Q, changeable in Settings.
03Reverse
Found a transcription and don’t know the word? Read it backwards.
Dictionaries, textbooks and linguistics papers are full of IPA without the spelling next to it. Select the transcription and press the same hotkey: IPAtics notices it is IPA and gives you the words it spells.
- No mode to switch
- The same hotkey works both ways. IPAtics tells IPA from ordinary text on its own.
- Every spelling, not a guess
- One sound often has several spellings. You see all of them, the closest match first.
- Stress and length forgiven
- Missing stress marks, length marks or a slightly different symbol still find the word.
- Works offline for most words
- Transcriptions are looked up in the bundled pronunciation dictionaries before anything is sent.
Available in every language IPAtics ships a pronunciation dictionary for.
04Learn the symbols
Every symbol explains itself.
IPA is only useful if you can read it. Hover or tap any symbol in a transcription to see its phonetic name and real words that contain it.
- The proper name
- Every symbol comes with its phonetic name, such as “voiceless palato-alveolar fricative”, so you can look it up anywhere.
- Examples in both languages
- A word from the language you are learning first, then the nearest match in one you already know.
- Checked by hand
- Example words are curated per language. If a sound doesn’t exist in a language, that row is left out rather than invented.
- Then go deeper
- Each sound also has its own page on this site, with example words you can play.
Browse all of them on the interactive IPA chart.
05Practice
Say it, and see exactly which sound went wrong.
Reading the IPA is half the job. Record yourself and the Speech Analyzer compares what it heard with the target, sound by sound, then tells you what to change: jaw, lips, tongue or voicing.
- Open Practice
- Record any word or sentence and get a score with a colour-coded strip of every phoneme.
- Minimal Pairs
- Drill the contrasts your ear merges, like ship and sheep, until you hear and produce both.
- Trouble Sounds
- Your most frequent mistakes, ranked by how often they happen, updated after every session.
- Mastery
- Progress per sound over time, from emerging to mastered.
Works in all 14 languages. Free accounts get a 3-day trial starting from the first analysis; Premium has no limit. See how pronunciation practice works.
06Remember
From a lookup to finished Anki cards in one click.
Making good pronunciation cards by hand takes minutes per word. IPAtics writes them for you: IPA, audio, an example sentence and a translation, pitched at your level and sent straight into your deck.
- Six card types
- Vocabulary, production, sentence cloze, IPA reading, sentence translation and minimal pairs.
- At your CEFR level
- Example sentences are written for the level you choose, from A1 to C2.
- Grammar that fits the language
- German articles and plurals, French gender, Russian case, Turkish vowel harmony.
- Straight into Anki
- Cards land in the deck you pick through the free AnkiConnect add-on. Nothing to import.
Free: 5 exports to try it. Premium: unlimited. More on Anki pronunciation cards.
07Read without stopping
Collect words while you keep reading.
When you are deep in an article, a textbook or an episode, even a small popup is an interruption. Focus Mode is a floating panel in the corner of your screen: send words to it and deal with them later.
- One key per word
- Select a word, press the Focus Mode hotkey, keep reading. The panel fills up in the background.
- Everything at a glance
- Each entry shows the word, its IPA and its language, with audio one click away.
- Always on top, never in the way
- The panel stays small and out of your reading area.
- Keep the session
- Save entries to your library or export the whole session as a CSV.
Default hotkey Alt+F.
08Your library
A pronunciation library you can search by sound.
Every word you save goes into one library, tied to your account rather than your computer. Search it by spelling or by IPA: type /ʃ/ and every saved word with that sound comes up.
- Search by IPA
- Find words by a sound you are working on, not only by how they are spelled.
- Filter and star
- Show one language at a time and star the words you keep getting wrong.
- Audio on every word
- Play any saved word without looking it up again.
- Take it with you
- Make Anki cards from any saved word, or export the whole library as a CSV.
Free: up to 20 words. Premium: no cap.
14 languages, every feature
Transcription, audio, tooltips, speech analysis and Anki cards all work in each of them. Auto-detect picks the language, or you choose it.
- English (US)
- English (UK)
- Arabic (MSA)
- Chinese (Mandarin)
- French
- German
- Hindi
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese (BR)
- Russian
- Spanish
- Turkish
Free to start, Premium when you need more
You can try every feature for free. Premium lifts the limits for €4.99 a month or €39.99 a year.
| Feature | Free | Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Transcriptions | 10 a day | No daily cap |
| Text length | 20 characters | 100 characters |
| Audio playback | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Speech Analyzer | 3-day trial | Unlimited |
| Anki exports | 5 to try | Unlimited |
| Saved words | 20 | Unlimited |
| Devices | 1 | 3 |
Try it on the next word you don’t know
Free for macOS and Windows. No card needed.
Installs only IPAtics, nothing bundled. What it does and how to uninstall