GUIDE

Loquendo alternative: Spanish text to speech for the same kind of videos

For a generation of Spanish-speaking internet users, text to speech means Loquendo, and above all Jorge, the Castilian male voice heard in countless YouTube tutorials, game walkthroughs and jokes in the mid-2000s. People still search for it to make the same kind of video today.

This guide explains what Loquendo was and what happened to it, and shows how to make that style of video now with SuperClonica: natural voices that speak Spanish and 30 other languages, free to try online, and a free engine for whole scripts.

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What Loquendo was

If you need the exact Jorge, only its license holder can give it to you. If you want the same kind of video with a voice of its own, read on.

  • Loquendo was a text-to-speech company in Turin, a 2001 spin-off of the research labs of Telecom Italia.
  • Nuance Communications bought it in 2011; its voices, including Jorge, were commercial voices licensed by the company.
  • In the mid-2000s Jorge became the narrator of many Spanish-language YouTube videos, from game tutorials to jokes.
  • SuperClonica does not offer Jorge; it offers natural voices in 31 languages, Spanish included.

Try a voice free online

On the page of any voice, type a line in Spanish of 30 to 100 characters, choose Spanish and press Voice it. In a few seconds you can listen and download the recording, with no account.

Make it sound like the old videos

Conversational Narrator and Game Narrator were recorded in Russian and may keep a slight accent in Spanish; listen first, or use a stock voice.

  • Pick a calm, even male voice: Conversational Narrator, Game Narrator or a stock M voice.
  • Write short, plain sentences: the old voices read with little emotion.
  • For a retro sound, export at 16 or 22 kHz and add a little compression in your editor.
  • For the quick pace of game tutorials, raise the speed a little with --speed 1.1.

Voice a whole video script

Put the whole script in guion.txt, install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and run superclonica --text-file guion.txt --voice M2 --lang es --speed 1.1 --normalize --output video.mp3. The engine has no character limit, writes MP3, WAV or OGG by the file name and keeps every part at the same loudness. Then drop the file under your gameplay, slides or meme.

Memes, voices and rights

Memes, tutorials and fan videos are a fine use of a synthetic narrator. Do not present the result as Loquendo or as Jorge, since those names belong to their owners. For a monetized channel, use the ten stock voices, M1 to M5 and F1 to F5, free under the OpenRAIL-M license, or your own voice trained in the SuperClonica studio; fan-made character voices in the catalog are for fan content.