The service offers a customization interface that you can use to define sounds-like or phonetic translations for words. A sounds-like translation consists of one or more words that, when combined, sound like the word. A phonetic translation is based on the SSML phoneme format for representing a word. You can specify a phonetic translation in standard International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representation or in the proprietary IBM Symbolic Phonetic Representation (SPR).