What is "arpabet"

Arpabet is a phonetic transcription code developed by Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a part of their Speech Understanding Project (1971–1976). It represents each phoneme of General American English with a distinct sequence of ASCII characters. Arpabet has been used in several speech synthesizers, including Computalker for the S-100 (Altair) system, SAM for the Commodore 64, SAY for the Amiga and TextAssist for the PC and Speakeasy from Intelligent Artefacts (see ST_Robotics) which used the Votrax SC01 speech synthesiser IC. It is also used in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.