What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a spoken language. English has around 44 phonemes. Roughly the spoken counterpart to a grapheme.
What is an example of phoneme in use?
The words "bat" and "pat" differ by one phoneme: /b/ versus /p/. The acoustic difference is tiny but linguistically meaningful.
How does ai-coustics use phonemes?
We don't build systems that explicitly model phonemes, but preserving phonetic detail is central to how Quail is trained. Consonants, sibilants, and fine phonetic distinctions are exactly the cues ASR relies on.
