Editing SAMPA (section)

==Features==
SAMPA was developed in the late 1980s in the [[European Commission]]-funded [[European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology|ESPRIT]] project 2589 "Speech Assessment Methods" (SAM)—hence "SAM Phonetic Alphabet"—in order to facilitate email data exchange and computational processing of transcriptions in phonetics and speech technology.

SAMPA is a partial [[encoding]] of the [[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]]. The first version of SAMPA was the union of the sets of phoneme codes for Danish, Dutch, English, French, German and Italian; later versions extended SAMPA to cover other European languages. Since SAMPA is based on phoneme inventories, each SAMPA table is valid only in the language it was created for. In order to make this [[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]] encoding technique universally applicable, [[X-SAMPA]] was created, which provides ''one single table'' without language-specific differences.

SAMPA was devised as a [[Hack (technology slang)|hack]] to work around the inability of [[text encoding]]s to represent IPA symbols. Consequently, as [[Unicode]] support for IPA symbols becomes more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreases. However, text input relies on specific keyboard encodings or input devices. For this reason, SAMPA and X-SAMPA are still widely used<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/project-euphonias-personalized-speech.html|title=Project Euphonia's Personalized Speech Recognition for Non-Standard Speech|website=Google AI Blog|language=en|access-date=2019-08-16}}</ref>{{Better source|date=August 2019}} in computational phonetics and in speech technology.