Text to speech with an accent
Sometimes you want an accent on purpose: a foreign character in a story, a tourist in a sketch, a narrator who sounds like he came from somewhere else. Most TTS services try hard to remove accents. With SuperClonica, an accent is something you can choose.
This guide explains where the accent comes from, which accents the catalog has today, how to make the accent stronger or lighter and what to do when the accent you need is not there.
Where the accent comes from
Every voice is made from a recording in one language, and every voice speaks all 31 languages of Supertonic 3. When a voice speaks a language other than the one it was recorded in, it keeps a trace of the original accent. So a voice recorded in English, reading Russian or Spanish text, speaks it with an English accent, and a voice recorded in Russian reads English with a Russian accent. The voice page says which language each voice was recorded in.
Accents in the catalog today
About forty voices were recorded in English, among them Jarvis (ENG), Batman and Twilight Sparkle: use them for an English accent in other languages. About 150 were recorded in Russian: use them for a Russian accent in English, as the Russian accent guide explains. For Russian text with a Caucasian accent there is the Dagestani Accent Voice, a mid-low male voice whose author made it as a character voice, not as the voice of a particular person.
Try an accent free
Open a voice page, type a line of 30 to 100 characters in the language you want, choose that language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you hear how strong the accent is and can download the recording, with no account. Try several voices: some keep a strong accent, others only a light one.
Stronger or lighter
The accent is strongest in sounds the recording language does not have, so a text full of them sounds more foreign. Short phrases with simple words keep the accent light. A slower speed, such as --speed 0.9 in the free engine, makes every sound clearer and the accent easier to hear. Install the engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and voice a whole script offline: superclonica --text-file lines.txt --voice voice.json --lang es --output lines.wav.
An accent the catalog does not have
For a French, Indian, Chinese or any other accent, a voice must be trained on a recording of a person who speaks with that accent and agreed to it. Upload a 5 to 10 second recording in the studio, or order such a voice from an author on the exchange. Use accents for characters and stories, not to mock real people or to pass a recording off as someone’s real voice.