[jcranmer]

> Edit: wtf, don't trust tools like http://ipa-reader.xyz that is near the top of search results. The default american voice pronounces /y/ like the "o" in "who". What's the point of IPA reader if you're going to pronounce an A like a B when your language doesn't have the A sound?! Accent is fine but don't change the sound to a different IPA character altogether...

I'm guessing the goal is to reproduce an accent, but if the natural language doesn't have the IPA in its phonology, then it's going to be mapped to the nearest representation. English doesn't distinguish between /y/ and /u/, so a native English speaker being asked to reproduce a /y/ sound (especially in running speech where you're not thinking about how to pronounce the sound in particular) is likely to end up with something near /u/ anyways.

[lucb1e]

For an IPA-to-sound converter, if the chosen voice doesn't have the sound that the user is asking it to render, it should: either throw an error, find an English speaker that can, or synthesise the sound altogether.

Giving you flat-out the wrong sound (not an accented rendition) should not be default behavior. There could be an option for rendering "how would an american approximate/recreate this sound after I sounded it out to them", but that's a different tool and not an IPA-to-sound converter.