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Phonetics

As explained in LLMs in Production

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, including their physical production, transmission, and perception.

What text leaves out

“Yeah, right” can sound sarcastic or congratulatory. The words alone do not settle the meaning; the listener also hears how they are spoken. section 2.1.1

Phonetics concerns speech sounds: how they are produced and perceived. Accent is one place it shows up. Phonology is related but asks how sounds are organized within a language system. Phonetics sits alongside syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and morphology as a component of language. section 2.1.1

Sound waves have numerical values that a computer can process, but speech is still complex. Audio carries cues absent from plain text, while acquiring and cleaning enough audio for LLM training is difficult. A multimodal model that processes audio files can bring phonetics into language modeling; the available dataset size remains a constraint. section 2.1.1 section 2.5

How LLMs in Production covers it

How deep it goes
Defines speech production and perception, distinguishes phonology, and discusses sound waves and dataset limits without detailing an audio-model implementation.
Examples
Illustrates spoken tone with “Yeah, right,” which can convey sarcasm or congratulations.
What you can do after
Evaluate/understand it: recognize when text omits vocal cues and why audio dataset constraints matter for language models.
How it connects
Connects phonetics to phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, and multimodal language models.
Cover of LLMs in Production
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Related concepts

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of LLMs in Production. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.