Show HN: A free online British accent generator for instant voice conversion | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A free online British accent generator for instant voice conversion

audioconvert.ai

25 pointsKatherine60347 comments

I've developed a simple AI-powered British accent generator. Enter or paste your text, select the voice that best fits your project's tone, and generate speech for free. It supports up to 500 characters and offers 8 distinct, lifelike voices. Everything runs entirely within your browser. I'm primarily seeking feedback on output quality, user experience, and any technical improvements worth exploring.

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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.

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

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.

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.

Upset girl is dodgy American imitation of nondescript home counties.

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

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

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

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

Kettering accent generator when :(

"British accent"

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

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".

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.

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.

> 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

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.

Pretty much everyone except British people uses this term.

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".

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.

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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.

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.

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

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)

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

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.

the nature presenter is broken but the others work

Magnetic Man is unmistakably American, and annoying with it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.)

"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?

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

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

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

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!

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

Is reverse classism still classism?

Not sure where you got classism from, I've got a number of posh southern public schoolboy friends; after all, it's not really their fault that they mispronounce "butter" as "batter". What I object to is the term "received pronunciation" which implicitly places their "fwah fwah" as being in some way correct and standard.

This needs a Roadman accent. Plz.

Awesome stuff.

Americans always think a British accent is exactly one accent.

I live in London part of the year.

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."

Failed to generate speech. Please try again. :(

Shows an error for me on Chrome Mobile

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...

"Magnetic man" is uh, not British.

I was expecting regional accent options, so disappointed.

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