Robot voice generator: text to speech that sounds like a machine
A robot voice is wanted for a sci-fi video, a game NPC, a smart-home alert or a meme. Old speech synthesizers sounded robotic by accident; modern text to speech sounds human. So a good robot voice today is a clear voice with a machine effect on top: it sounds like a robot and is still easy to understand.
SuperClonica gives you the voice: AI assistant and film voices, calm announcers and free stock voices, free to try online, and a free engine for whole scripts. This guide shows which voices to start from, how to write lines for a machine and how to add the robot effect in an editor or in a few lines of Python.
Voices to start from
Start from a calm, even voice: emotion in the base voice works against the machine effect. Business Male Voice and Pleasant Announcer were recorded in Russian and may keep a slight accent in English.
- Jarvis (ENG) and Jarvis: the calm voice of an AI assistant, made from the English original and from the Russian dub.
- Darth Vader: a voice heard through a mask, recorded in English.
- Business Male Voice and Pleasant Announcer: even, neutral delivery, a good base for a ship computer or a station announcement.
- The ten stock voices of the model: neutral male and female voices, free and safe to publish; take an F voice for a female AI.
Try a voice free online
On the page of any voice, type a line of 30 to 100 characters, for example “System check complete. All units are online and ready.”, choose the language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you can listen and download the clean recording, with no account, and add the effect afterwards.
Write like a machine
Machines do not hesitate: cut every “well” and “you know” from the script.
- Use short statements without filler: “Access granted. Door unlocked.”
- Digits are read as whole numbers, so unit 734 becomes seven hundred and thirty-four; to read it digit by digit, write “seven three four”.
- Write a countdown as words with full stops: “Three. Two. One.”
- Write abbreviations and names the way they should sound.
Make it sound robotic
The engine and the site give a clean voice and have no effects, so the robot comes from your editor. In Audacity or a DAW, ring modulation at about 30 Hz gives the classic sci-fi robot, a very short echo of 10 to 30 ms makes the voice metallic, a vocoder over a synth tone makes it musical, and lowering the sample rate or bit depth gives an old computer. With the free engine you can do the ring modulator in Python, no editor needed: python -m pip install superclonica-cpu, then from superclonica import Superclonica; import numpy as np, soundfile as sf; tts = Superclonica(); audio, rate = tts.synthesize('System check complete. All units are online and ready.', 'M1', 'en'); t = np.arange(len(audio)) / rate; sf.write('robot.wav', audio * np.sin(2 * np.pi * 30 * t), rate). numpy and soundfile come with the engine. If you want a voice that is robotic by itself, an old formant synthesizer such as eSpeak NG sounds like one out of the box, but it is much harder to understand.
Robot voices you can publish
A robot voice made from the ten stock voices, M1 to M5 and F1 to F5, is free to publish under the OpenRAIL-M license, within its restrictions; so is one made from your own voice trained in the SuperClonica studio. Jarvis and Darth Vader are fan-made voices of film characters: fine for fan videos and memes, not for ads or a product you sell.