Notes on Ian Tincknell

An IPA-to-Speech Side Quest

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve been kicking myself since launching Reverse Wiktionary because one of the first friends I sent it to said, “You should add pronunciations.” The Wiktextract data includes both International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) UTF-8 pronunciations and, for many words, URLs for user-created audio. This should have been a no-brainer!

Using the IPA for text-to-speech became a small side project: ipa-to-mespeak , a portable encoder that translates Unicode IPA into the phoneme notation expected by meSpeak/eSpeak-style speech synthesis. In Reverse Wiktionary, that makes it possible to fall back to generated pronunciation audio when a recording is not available but a usable IPA transcription is.

Reverse Wiktionary

Thu, 21 May 2026 17:32:58 -0400

I’m excited to share my first post-graduation demo project: Reverse-Wiktionary.com . As my academic workload started to lighten over the past few weeks, I started thinking about building some demonstration projects and experimenting with cloud infrastructure. I’ve been seeing a lot of interest in semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation, so I thought a great place to start would be a project involving natural language semantic embedding.

High-Level

Before getting too into the weeds: at a high level the project is a multilingual reverse dictionary. The user enters a meaning written in natural language and the service returns words with closely matching meanings from Wiktionary.org. The app supports over 4,000 languages and allows filter selection for individual languages or language families.

Graduation 🎉

Tue, 19 May 2026 08:21:30 -0400

I’ve recently reached a major milestone in my career journey with the completion of a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in spring 2026. This is the second time I’ve walked with a master’s hood in the past two years, having earned my MBA in 2024 from the same alma mater. I wanted to take a moment, while the experience is still fresh, to reflect on what an unusual journey it has been to get here.

The Twisting Ribbon

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400

In the summer of 2023, I was working to fast-track the completion of my MBA and prepare for a master’s in computer science. As a political science graduate with a couple of hobby coding projects under my belt, I had some gaps to fill, so I was taking Organizational Behavior & Leadership at the same time as Linear Algebra Foundations, Calculus III, and Data Structures.

I’m always looking for interesting ways to apply the concepts I learn about in courses. One of my favorite examples came from calculus, when I started thinking about two skew lines in three-dimensional space.