| We very often get requests for English voices with a
huge variety of accents. While we offer great voices designed
for American English, British English, Australian English, and even
Indian Accent English, other accents have been harder to come by.
For example, what if you want to have English text read as someone
from Japan would speak it. While most voices are designed to
only read one language, a few voices have been designed to read
their native language and English. And many others will do a
decent job with English.
As a demonstration of these capabilities, we've done an
experiment below having foreign language voices speak English text,
just to give you an idea of the results you would get. Some
voices do a pretty poor job. Some, while not really great,
really sound like a person from the given country who is learning to
speak somewhat broken English. A few others are fantastic and
offer a legitimate alternative to standard English voices.
Samples of each are below, with a bit of commentary in
red
for those that are really worth a close listen. Also important
to note that we did not attempt to correct pronunciations.
With a few voices we slowed them down to -2 just to make them a bit
more understandable, but I suspect with a little tweaking or the
text, all would do a better job.
If you find one you like, they can be purchased from our
More Voices page.
The text used in each sample is the following paragraph:
Hello. This is a test of trying voices designed for other
languages, speaking english text. People are frequently looking
for different accents and it turns out that some foreign
language voices do a decent job with english text. Results may
vary depending on the actual text you use, but hopefully this
sample gives you an idea of what the voice is capable of.
Acapela Salma Arabic -
MP3 Sample (Excellent)
Acapela Youssef Arabic -
MP3 Sample (Excellent)
Acapela Sofie Belgian -
MP3 Sample (Good)
Nuance Sin-Ji Cantonese Hong Kong -
MP3 Sample (Perfect)
NeoSpeech Lily Chinese -
MP3 Sample (Excellent and Funny)
Nuance Mei-Ling Chinese - MP3
Sample (Good)
Nuance Nanna Danish -
MP3 Sample
Acapela Femke Dutch -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Claire Dutch -
MP3 Sample (Good)
Nuance Ellen Dutch -
MP3 Sample (Good)
Nuance Laura Dutch -
MP3 Sample (Good)
Nuance Julie French Canadian -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Sebastian French -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Virginie French -
MP3 Sample (Good)
Acapela Sarah German -
MP3 Sample (Excellent)
AT&T Klara German -
MP3 Sample
AT&T Reiner German -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Steffi German -
MP3 Sample (Excellent)
Nuance Yannick German -
MP3 Sample (Excellent)
Nuance Silvia Italian -
MP3 Sample (Good)
Acapela Chiara Italian -
MP3 Sample
NeoSpeech Show Japanese -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Kyoko Japanese -
MP3 Sample (Good)
NeoSpeech Wang Japanese
MP3 Sample (Excellent and Funny)
NeoSpeech Yumi Korean -
MP3 Sample (Good)
NeoSpeech Junwoo Korean -
MP3 Sample (Good)
Nuance Narae Korean -
MP3 Sample
Acapela Kari Norwegian -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Nora Norwegian -
MP3 Sample (Good)
Nuance Madalena Portugal -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Raquel Brazil -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Katerina Russian -
MP3 Sample (Excellent)
Nuance Javier Spanish -
MP3 Sample
Acapela Maria Spanish -
MP3 Sample
AT&T Rosa Spanish -
MP3 Sample
Nuance Paulina Spanish - MP3
Sample
Acapela Emma Swedish -
MP3 Sample
Acapela Erik Swedish -
MP3 Sample
As you can tell, some voices just aren't too good at it.
With some of the others, they do a good job on 90% of the words, but
then one really badly pronounce word can cause you to lose it.
Still others sound really great. Of course all of this is very
subjective, and you might rate them differently. It seems that
the French voices have the most trouble, while some of the Asian
voices are fantastic, although often humorous to my ear. Not
all of our voices are included above, as some others just didn't
handle english well at all.
You can purchase these and more voices on our
More Voices Page.
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