A phone is the smallest unit of sound that we can identify in spoken language. It matters because linguists use phones to analyze and understand how languages work at the most basic level of sound production.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
In phonetics (a branch of linguistics), a phone is any distinct speech sound. It is any surface-level or unanalyzed sound of a language, the smallest identifiable unit occurring inside a stream of speech. In spoken human language, a phone is thus any vowel or consonant sound. In sign languages, a phone is the equivalent of a unit of gesture.
Phones versus phonemes
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).