Praat is a speech analysis application and source repository for doing phonetics by computer. It was created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink at the University of Amsterdam. The software lets researchers, linguists, clinicians, teachers, and students analyze, synthesize, manipulate, and annotate speech recordings. It supports acoustic inspection through waveforms, spectrograms, pitch tracks, formants, intensity, and related phonetic measurements. Praat also includes scripting tools for automating repetitive analysis, building custom workflows, and processing larger speech datasets. The project is especially useful for academic phonetics, speech science, language documentation, pronunciation research, and publication-quality speech visualization.
Features
- Speech waveform and spectrogram analysis
- Pitch, formant, and intensity measurement
- Speech synthesis and manipulation
- TextGrid annotation support
- Praat scripting automation
- Publication-quality phonetic figures