44 comments

  • pjc50 5 hours ago ago

    British accent review time!

    "Nature Show Host": not David Attenborough, surprisingly

    "Compelling Lady": nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday

    "Upset Girl": this is more the voiceover that would be used on depressing animal charity adverts

    "Magnetic Man": you can't fool me, that's an American

    "Patient Man": patience gives you reverb. The word "British" is spoken with a very non-British accent.

    Not to be all Henry Higgins, but these are all "placeless" accents and there are no regional accent options. I was looking forward to trying Computer Mancunian. But I can see why for marketing voiceover people want "global neutral British".

    UX review: "failed to generate speech". Only the example phrases work.

    • dpoloncsak 2 hours ago ago

      I just want to be able to speak like James Acaster.

      Kettering accent generator when :(

    • arethuza 5 hours ago ago

      I tried to get it to generate a hearty "Fit like min?" - no luck.

    • happymellon 5 hours ago ago

      Patient man, sounds a little Welsh, maybe some Indian twangs in there too?

      • abanana an hour ago ago

        To me (I'm Welsh) the Indian twang sounds clear, but there are some odd similarities between Welsh and Indian accents.

        Upset Girl isn't "natural sounding". It's a voice I feel I've heard in AI demos before.

        • happymellon an hour ago ago

          Upset girl is dodgy American imitation of nondescript home counties.

          The sort of foreign "actresses trying to be Lara Croft" sort of thing.

        • happymellon an hour ago ago

          I think the Welsh for me is when Patient Man says "audio".

      • shrubby 4 hours ago ago

        I tried Irvine Welsh so perhaps the wrong kind of Welsh, but I got a generator error while trying to ask for Mark Hunt having a pint.

  • GJim 5 hours ago ago

    "British accent"

    Who uses this term? English, Welsh and Scottish accents sound nothing like each other!

    • afandian 3 hours ago ago

      People who don't live there, or are selling to people who don't live there?

      In the UK we use the phrase "American accent" and it's OK. It means "there exists an American who would use this accent" not "all Americans use this accent".

    • dghf 4 hours ago ago

      This is true, but you could also say the same about the phrases "English accent" and "Scottish accent" -- a Scouse accent sounds nothing like RP, and a Highland lilt is very different from the accent in the Gorbals.

      And the Appalachian accents of Justified sound very different to the Mid-Atlantic accent of Frasier Crane -- yet to me, as an outsider, there is still an indefinable "Americanness" common to them all.

      • bossyTeacher 3 hours ago ago

        > there is still an indefinable "Americanness" common to them all

        I believe it is more of self fulfilling prophecy imo. Some quality you treat as American AFTER you learn it is an american accent rather than something you see as american before (or regardless of whether) you even know if it is american

        • dghf 2 hours ago ago

          Maybe? But I heard an Orkney accent once, and my mind refused to classify it as Scottish, even though it was coming from a Scottish mouth.

    • Vinnl 4 hours ago ago

      There's plenty of difference within English accents as well. I'll generally classify any of them as English, I think.

      That said, when I use the term British accent, I do usually mean English, I think. Sorry. Also sorry for all the times I used England when I meant UK, or UK when I meant Great Britain, or vice versa.

    • stevage 3 hours ago ago

      Pretty much everyone except British people uses this term.

    • bossyTeacher 4 hours ago ago

      The reality is that no accent (not even english ones) sound like each other technically. Consider a south east accent with a scouse accent, for example. Both English, both nothing like each other.

      I believe the correct expression would be "British accents".

  • rjmunro an hour ago ago

    What do you mean "Everything runs entirely within your browser."? The audio comes from https://se-data-us-oss.oss-us-west-1.aliyuncs.com/audioconve......

    I have seen speech synthesis entirely in the browser, e.g. https://github.com/diffusionstudio/vits-web

    It works quite well but is a bit slow to start because you have to download the models each time.

  • gwbas1c 2 hours ago ago

    I thought this was going to convert my spoken voice to a British accent. When I opened the link, I was quite disappointed to see that it's just text-to-speech.

    In the late 1990s I had text-to-speech on my run-of-the-mill 100mhz Pentium running Windows 98, with 8MB RAM. I could select the voice too.

    It was also good enough to read my high school reading assignment, which I recorded to cassette and then listened to on a long drive.

    ---

    So, what's novel about this site? As a learning project, it's pretty cool! (And I hope you built some good skills and enjoyed yourself making it.) Otherwise, there isn't much difference from what we had 30 years ago on much simpler hardware.

  • roywiggins 3 hours ago ago

    “authentic” might not be the right adjective, surely the whole point is that they're synthetic

  • ladybro 5 hours ago ago

    Keep getting "Failed to generate speech. Please try again." on Brave + Chrome.

    HTZc3SNl.js:1 Failed to generate speech: Error: Invalid API response format at Z (HTZc3SNl.js:1:29240)

    • drcongo 5 hours ago ago

      Same here. I was hoping to type in "Dos cerverzas por favor" and hear it shout "TWO BEEROS HERE PEDRO".

      • drcongo 5 hours ago ago

        I did finally get it to generate something using the "Patient man" persona, and "Dos cerverzas por favor" does actually sound like a brit struggling with their Spanish pronunciation.

    • techterrier 5 hours ago ago

      the nature presenter is broken but the others work

  • mkarliner 4 hours ago ago

    Magnetic Man is unmistakably American, and annoying with it.

  • OJFord 5 hours ago ago

    Initial feedback: they're all too slow after the initial 'welcome...generator' sentence, doesn't sound natural.

    (Also struggled getting it working at all as others already noted.)

  • thorio 3 hours ago ago

    Shows an error for me on Chrome Mobile

  • laccybandball 5 hours ago ago

    "British accents are known for their pronunciation patterns, intonation, and rhythm, which differ from American, Australian, or other English accents. A British accent generator focuses on these speech characteristics to create audio that sounds natural and familiar to UK listeners." What kind of Slop is this? British accent is different from other English accents?

    • pjc50 4 hours ago ago

      I think the phrase that's missing is "British Recieved Pronunciation"

      • jjgreen 4 hours ago ago

        That "RP" really gets my goat, received from whom? Some snot-nosed southern twat it would seem.

        • forgotusername6 3 hours ago ago

          Received from the person who taught it to you. Apparently it is meant to be taught/learnt. It was a way of leveling out all the regional accents for public school pupils. You too can have RP if you want it, it's not owned by the southerners!

          • card_zero 3 hours ago ago

            It's more like a diagonal line really, as if the Fosse Way had been a fortification.

        • card_zero 3 hours ago ago

          How do you feel about the phrase received wisdom, does that also stir you into anger at some invisible caricature?

  • kumarski 5 hours ago ago

    This needs a Roadman accent. Plz.

    Awesome stuff.

    • fredley 5 hours ago ago

      Americans always think a British accent is exactly one accent.

      • kumarski 4 hours ago ago

        I live in London part of the year.

      • krapp 4 hours ago ago

        Americans think a British accent is either "posh snob" or "chimney sweep."

        Meanwhile the rest of the world thinks an American accent is either "Travis Bickle" or "Yosemite Sam."

  • stevage 3 hours ago ago

    "Magnetic man" is uh, not British.

  • Kichererbsen 4 hours ago ago

    Man I'm so disappointed: I thought I'd be able to use this tool to learn different British accents but apparently the tool "British" is already an accent...

  • martinclayton 2 hours ago ago

    I was expecting regional accent options, so disappointed.

  • anovikov 5 hours ago ago

    Are these for the purpose of selling to non-Brits right? "Being British is supposed to be classy and surely not associated with Trump as much as being an American"?

    That might work, but not for selling to Brits because they expect some sort of a local accent. Universal/unlocalised voice does not sound natural or believable to them.

    • mkarliner 4 hours ago ago

      In movies, English accents, are usually villains...

      • voidUpdate 3 hours ago ago

        Somewhat less true in english movies, or movies set in england. I don't think any of the kids in Harry Potter were the villains

      • anovikov 3 hours ago ago

        Fun observation! A similar thing existed in Soviet movies: villains usually spoke with Ukrainian accent.

        • RupertSalt 3 hours ago ago

          During an opening scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Dr. Jones is surrounded by hostile Russian soldiers, but he immediately observes that Dr. Irina Spalko [Cate Blanchett] "isn't from around here" and he goes on to describe her unique accent, correctly naming her origin as Eastern Ukrain[ian Soviet Socialist Republic].

          https://youtu.be/Wr6VlTfdhxw?si=Eqy8j6jz49-vAA5x