pycotovia

Pure-Python G2P (grapheme-to-phoneme) phonemizer for Galician and Spanish, based on the Cotovia TTS system.

Features

• Two languages — Galician (gl) and Spanish (es) with language-specific exception lists and rewrite rules.
• Zero dependencies — pure Python, no C extensions, no heavy ML models.
• Fast enough — single-word latency is well under 1 ms on modern hardware.
• Parity-tested — verified against the original Cotovia C binary for Galician (see docs/parity.md).
• IPA output — optional mapping from Cotovia phoneme symbols to IPA.

Installation

pip install pycotovia

Requires Python >= 3.11.

Quick start

import pycotovia

# Galician (default)
print(pycotovia.phonemize("Ola, como estás?"))      # → "ola komo estajs"
print(pycotovia.phonemize("guerra", lang="gl"))      # → "gerra"

# Spanish
print(pycotovia.phonemize("México", lang="es"))      # → "meksiko"
print(pycotovia.phonemize("México", lang="gl"))      # → "meSiko"

# IPA mapping
print(pycotovia.cotovia_to_ipa("gerra"))              # → "ɣɛra"

CLI

# Galician
echo "Ola mundo" | pycotovia

# Spanish
echo "Hola mundo" | pycotovia -l es

# From file
cat words.txt | pycotovia -l gl > phonemes.txt

Differences from the Cotovia binary

See docs/parity.md for the full parity test results and the deliberate divergences.

Documentation

• docs/architecture.md — pipeline overview and module map
• docs/parity.md — verification against the Cotovia binary
• docs/api.md — public API reference

Examples

See the examples/ directory for:

• basic_usage.py — single words, phrases, and IPA
• spanish_usage.py — Spanish-specific examples
• phrase_processing.py — batch processing from a file

License

Apache-2.0 — this is a clean-room reimplementation in Python, not a derivative of the C++ source.

Acknowledgements

This is a clean-room port of the Cotovia G2P subsystem (transcription rules, syllabification, stress assignment, and exception lists) from C++ to Python. Cotovia was developed by the Multimedia Technologies Group at the University of Vigo and the Centro Ramón Piñeiro for Research in Humanities.