Unicode supports several phonetic scripts and notations through its existing scripts and the addition of extra blocks with phonetic characters. These phonetic characters are derived from an existing script, usually Latin, Greek or Cyrillic. Apart from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), extensions to the IPA and obsolete and nonstandard IPA symbols, these blocks also contain characters from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet.

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The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) makes use of letters from other writing systems as most phonetic scripts do. IPA notably uses Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters. Combining diacritics also add meaning to the phonetic text. Finally, these phonetic alphabets make use of modifier letters, that are specially constructed for phonetic meaning. A "modifier letter" is strictly intended not as an independent grapheme but as a modification of the preceding character^[1] resulting in a distinct grapheme, notably in the context of the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example, ʰ should not occur on its own but modifies the preceding or following symbol. Thus, tʰ is a single IPA symbol, distinct from t. In practice, however, several of these "modifier letters" are also used as full graphemes, e.g. ʿ as transliterating Semitic ayin or Hawaiian ʻokina, or ˚ transliterating Abkhaz ә.

• Basic Latin (0020–007E), IPA example: Open front unrounded vowel (0061)
• Latin-1 Supplement (00A0–00FF), IPA example: Near-open front unrounded vowel (00E6)
• Latin Extended-A (0100–017F), IPA example: Voiceless pharyngeal fricative (0127)
• Latin Extended-B (0180–024F), IPA example: Tenuis dental click (01C0 0287)
• IPA Extensions (0250–02AF), IPA example: Near-open central vowel (0250)
• Spacing Modifier Letters (02B0–02FF), IPA example: Palatal ejective (0063 02BC)
• Combining Diacritical Marks (0300–036F), IPA example: Near-close central unrounded vowel (026A 0308)
• Greek and Coptic (0370–03FF), IPA example: Voiced bilabial fricative (03B2)
• Combining Diacritical Marks Extended (1AB0–1AFF), extIPA examples: combining parentheses
• Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (1DC0–1DFF), IPA example: Rising-falling contour tone (1DC8)
• General Punctuation (2000–206F), IPA example: Linking (absence of a break) (203F)
• Superscripts and Subscripts (2070–209F), IPA example: Nasal release (207F)
• Arrows (2190–21FF), IPA example: Global rise (2197)
• Latin Extended-C (2C60–2C7F), IPA example: Labiodental flap (2C71)
• Modifier Tone Letters (A700–A71F), IPA example: Upstep (A71B)
• Phonetic Extensions (1D00–1D7F)
• Phonetic Extensions Supplement (1D80–1DBF)
• Latin Extended-D (A720–A7FF)
• Latin Extended-E (AB30–AB6F)
• Latin Extended-F (10780–107BF)
• Latin Extended-G (1DF00–1DFFF)

Six Unicode blocks contain many phonetic symbols:

Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a screen-selection entry method.

Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program (find it by hitting ⊞ Win+R then type charmap then hit ↵ Enter) since version NT 4.0 – appearing in the consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, and the table can be limited to a particular code block. More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable freeware example is BabelMap).

macOS provides a "character palette" with much the same functionality, along with searching by related characters, glyph tables in a font, etc. It can be enabled in the input menu in the menu bar under System Preferences → International → Input Menu (or System Preferences → Language and Text → Input Sources) or can be viewed under Edit → Emoji & Symbols in many programs.

Equivalent tools – such as gucharmap (GNOME) or kcharselect (KDE) – exist on most Linux desktop environments.

• Unicode symbols
• Universal Character Set characters
• Latin script in Unicode
• IPA