At Rime, we’ve always believed in the power of speech. And today, we’re proud to unveil a bold new mission:
To ensure that A-yay Ee-jay I-yay benefits all of humanity.
To that end, we’re thrilled to announce that Mist v2, our flagship text-to-speech model now natively supports Pig Latin!
Pig Latin is just the latest example of Rime's expressive, playful, and radically flexible synthetic speech. This release reflects our continued commitment to bringing the most lifelike and authentic speech to enterprises and startups building voice AI applications at scale.
Now let's dive into what makes Pig Latin linguistically interesting. Then we'll share some of the technical reasons why Rime is uniquely able to build a model like this in such a short amount of time.
Language Games: Play Makes AI Human
All over the world, people invent playful systems for warping speech, often to confuse, sometimes to amuse, always to connect. Linguists call these language games, and they’re deeply human.
Pig Latin is the most iconic example in English. But there are many others:
-izzle speak – Snoop Dogg’s iconic affixation system: for sure → fo shizzle
Ubbi Dubbi – adds “ub” before every vowel: hello → hubellubo
Verlan – reverses syllables in French slang: femme → meuf
Jeringonza – pads syllables in Spanish: amigo → apa-mipi-go-po
Twin Peaks’ backwards speech – phonemically reversed speech re-reversed in audio for surreal dream logic
And now, the AI voices in Mist v2 can play along too!
Technical Re-port: Sound Thinking with Phonemes
Rime’s TTS engine is distinct in that it's built on a phoneme-first architecture, enabling transformations that operate at the sound structure level, not just characters or words.
A phoneme, by the way, is the smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning, like the difference between /b/ and /p/ in bat vs pat. The human brain processes language primarily through phonetic patterns, recognizing and assembling phonemes into meaningful units long before decoding letters or written words.
Because Mist v2 is deeply phonologically aware and mimics the human brain, it can support not only naturalistic prosody and pronunciation, but also linguistically novel surface transformations (such as Pig Latin) with minimal additional complexity.
Seriously this idea went from a late Friday afternoon joke to an initial version in a few minutes... But of course we polished things a bit before launch.
The Rule System for Pig Latin
Pig Latin operates on the syllable structure of words, particularly their onsets — the initial consonant(s) before the syllable nucleus (usually a vowel).
We implement the following high-level rules:
If a word starts with a vowel-ish phoneme (think a, e, i, o, u, but also diphthongs like oi /ɔɪ/, ow /aʊ/, oo /uː/), we append ‘yay’ (/jeɪ/) to the end of the word.
Example: "April" /ˈeɪ.prɪl/ → "April-yay" /ˈeɪ.prɪl.jeɪ/
(Note: some dialects use ‘hay’ /heɪ/ or ‘way’ /weɪ/ here — we’ve chosen ‘yay’ for its popularity and phonological harmony.)Otherwise:
Identify and remove the onset (the initial consonant or consonant cluster of the first syllable)
Move that onset to the end of the word
Append the ‘ey’ (/eɪ/) sound to the end
Example: "Happy" /ˈhæ.pi/ → "Appy-hay" /ˈæ.pi.heɪ/
This rule set is implemented entirely in our phoneme processing layer, meaning it works seamlessly across Mist’s full synthesis pipeline — with no retraining, no rearchitecture, and minimal side effects (unless you count laughter).
Fun Fact: Why We're Called Rime
In phonology, the rime of a syllable is everything except the onset — it includes the nucleus (usually a vowel) and any following coda consonants.
So in a word like "cat" /kæt/:
The onset is /k/
The rime is /æt/
That's why words like cat /kæt/ and hat /hæt/ rhyme, because they share the same rime: /æt/.
And yes, that’s where our company name comes from. Because at Rime, we care about the part of speech that really matters: the part that resonates!
Try It Live
We’ve enabled Pig Latin generation on the Rime homepage today. This is both an April Fools’ joke and a proof point of what’s possible when you build language generation the right way, from the sound up!
👉 Try out pig latin on the Rime homepage now!
From all of us at Rime, Happy April Fools!
