How to to specify pronunciations for OS X Lion?

The text-to-speech function on Mac OS X Lion is quite good, although sometimes it misses the just-right pronunciation of a word.

Is there a way to specify a pronunciation for certain words or phrases in Lion?

For example, let's say my friend's name is "Tony", and the voice for OS X (Alex) pronounces Tony "tooney". Is there a way that I can set Tony to be pronounced the same way Alex pronounces "Toe Nee"?

Open Applications > Services > VoiceOver Utility and go to Speech > Pronunciation. Add a subsitution for "Tony" and tell it to pronounce it as "toe nee".

Interestingly, my computer running 10.7.3 with the Alex voice pronounces Tony correctly. Because of this, I wasn't able to test this solution, so it may not work.

You can also use [[inpt PHON]]:

 [[inpt PHON]]_t1OW ~n2EY.[[inpt TEXT]]

See the Speech Synthesis Programming Guide.

If you download the Auxiliary Tools for Xcode package from https://developer.apple.com/downloads, you can use the Repeat After Me application to convert text to the phonetic syntax: