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

https://audioconvert.ai/british-accent-generator

by Katherine603 • 5 months ago

25 47 5 months ago

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.

pjc502• 5 months 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.

happymellon3• 5 months ago

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

shrubby• 5 months 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.

abanana• 5 months 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.

arethuza• 5 months ago

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

dpoloncsak• 5 months ago

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

Kettering accent generator when :(

ladybro• 5 months 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)

drcongo2• 5 months ago

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

drcongo2• 5 months 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 months ago

the nature presenter is broken but the others work

laccybandball• 5 months 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?

pjc502• 5 months ago

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

jjgreen2• 5 months ago

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

anovikov2• 5 months 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.

mkarliner2• 5 months ago

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

anovikov2• 5 months ago

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

voidUpdate• 5 months 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

OJFord• 5 months 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.)

kumarski2• 5 months ago

This needs a Roadman accent. Plz.

Awesome stuff.

fredley• 5 months ago

Americans always think a British accent is exactly one accent.

kumarski2• 5 months ago

I live in London part of the year.

krapp• 5 months 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."

GJim• 5 months ago

"British accent"

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

bossyTeacher2• 5 months 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".

Vinnl• 5 months 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.

dghf2• 5 months 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.

bossyTeacher2• 5 months 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

stevage2• 5 months ago

Pretty much everyone except British people uses this term.

afandian• 5 months 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".

Kichererbsen• 5 months 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...

mkarliner2• 5 months ago

Magnetic Man is unmistakably American, and annoying with it.

roywiggins• 5 months ago

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

stevage2• 5 months ago

"Magnetic man" is uh, not British.

thorio• 5 months ago

Shows an error for me on Chrome Mobile

martinclayton• 5 months ago

I was expecting regional accent options, so disappointed.

gwbas1c• 5 months 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.

rjmunro• 5 months 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.

nipperkinfeet• 5 months ago

Failed to generate speech. Please try again. :(

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

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