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You can control how certain words are pronounced. This is useful for uncommon words such as brand names, proper nouns, and technical terms. To use the feature, you set a pronunciation dictionary on the agent. The dictionary is a list of entries, and each entry has:
  • Word or phrase to be annotated. For example, actually.
  • Phonetic alphabet to use. ipa and cmu are supported, depending on the voice (see Voice support).
  • Phoneme with the pronunciation in the selected alphabet.
For example:

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Voice support

Which phonetic alphabets you can use depends on the selected voice provider and its effective voice model. The dashboard shows the supported alphabets under Pronunciation in the agent’s speech settings. See supported languages by provider for voice-model language restrictions. If an ElevenLabs voice uses Auto, an English-only agent resolves to Flash v2 and supports IPA and CMU. Agents that use other languages resolve to a newer ElevenLabs model that does not support pronunciation dictionaries. The dashboard displays the resulting support. If the selected voice or voice model does not support pronunciation dictionaries, the Add button is hidden. Existing entries stay on the agent but do not affect the current voice. Switch to a supported voice or voice model to add entries or make existing entries take effect. You can still edit an existing entry and change its alphabet while using an unsupported voice. The dialog warns that the entry does not affect the current voice.

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How many entries can I add?

The pronunciation dictionary is a list on the agent — you can add multiple entries and there is no fixed cap enforced by the API. In practice:
  • Add one entry per word or short phrase you want to override. Each entry needs its own word, alphabet, and phoneme.
  • Keep the dictionary focused on words the model actually mispronounces (uncommon proper nouns, brand names, technical terms, foreign words). Overriding common words can produce unnatural speech.
  • Use a unique word value for each entry. The API rejects updates that contain duplicate word values.
  • Very large dictionaries can push the agent payload close to request size limits when calling update-agent. If you hit that, split entries across agents or trim rarely used words.

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Finding the phonetic pronunciation

You can search online to find the phonetic pronunciation of a word, or use tools like: