pronounce-word

pronounce-word — speak the word out loud

Purpose. When the user asks how to pronounce an English word — and especially a project, product, or programmer-jargon name (kubectl, nginx, Pydantic, LaTeX, JSON, ...) — don't just respond in text. Play the audio so they can hear the community reading, then add a short text caption with the source.

Trigger patterns

Auto-invoke ONLY when the user's message matches a single-word or short-name pronunciation request:

• English: how to pronounce <X>, how do you pronounce <X>, pronounce <X>, how do you say <X>, what does <X> sound like
• Chinese: <X> 怎么读, <X> 怎么念, <X> 怎么发音, 读一下 <X>, 念一下 <X>

<X> MUST be a single token: a word, project name, product name, acronym, or identifier — the kind of thing a developer would actually type into say-it <X>. The dictionary is keyed on single tokens, so multi-word input is spoken raw (not looked up); for a two-part name pick the head token (say-it postgres, not say-it postgres database).

Do NOT trigger this skill when:

• <X> is a sentence or paragraph the user wants narrated (e.g. 读一下这段 / read this paragraph). That's a TTS request, not a pronunciation lookup. Suggest say "<sentence>" instead, or just answer in text.
• The message is asking about pronunciation conceptually (e.g. IPA 是什么 / what is phonetic spelling). Answer in text.
• <X> is non-English everyday vocabulary or a person's name unrelated to tech. The dictionary's editorial scope is tech-only — fall through to a text-only answer, or skip.

If the target token is ambiguous (multiple candidates in the message), ask which one before invoking.

What to do

1. Speak it 3 times via say-it.

   say-it <word>
   

   The CLI looks the word up in the dictionary and, if found, sends the dictionary's English-like respelling (e.g. "koob control") to the TTS engine so the pronunciation is the intended community reading — not whatever the engine would have guessed from the spelling alone. (macOS say does not parse IPA / [[inpt PHON]] / SSML <phoneme> markup — it reads them literally — so the dictionary stores respellings that ride the engine's built-in letter-to-sound rules.) If the word isn't in the dictionary, the CLI speaks the raw spelling.