How to detect homophone

Question

I am fairly new to speech processing, but wondering how homophones are detected. I am in search for an API which gives similarity between two words on the basis of how they are pronounced.

for example: "to" and "two" are highly similar in terms of how they sound with respect to say "to" and "from".

Answer 1

You might want to try calculating the edit distance not on the original strings, but on pronunciations, like they are available in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict

Answer 2

The following are used for indexing words by their English pronunciation Soundex or Metaphone. You can use python packages like Fuzzy that implement several indexing algorithms.

import fuzzy