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Comment by drag0s | Hacker News Reader

English sounds really great, congrats! other languages I've tried doesn't sound that good, you can hear a strong english accent

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With Italian, it starts reading the text with an absolutely comical American accent, but then about 10-20 words in it gradually snaps into a natural Italian pronunciation and it sounds fantastic from that point on. Not sure what's going on behind the scenes, but it sounds like it starts with an en-us baseline and then somehow zones in on the one you specified. Using Alice.

the Italian example with mixed languages is especially bad: the Italian, German Japanese and Arabic all have very very heavy english accents.

The "dramatic movie scene" ends up being comical

I tried Greek and it started speaking nonsense in english

this needs a lot more work to be sold

The French one sounded like an Alabaman who took a semester of college French.

But the English sounds really good.

If you're trying to make an audiobook about an Alabaman visiting Paris this might be quite useful... But in seriousness try it with this voice: https://elevenlabs.io/app/voice-library?voiceId=rbFGGoDXFHtV...

I'll give it a check. I was playing the sample on the v3 page.

For Portuguese, interestingly enough one of the voices (Liam) has a Spanish accent. Also, the language flag is from Portugal, but the style is clearly Brazilian Portuguese.

Can you try with a voice that was trained on that language? This research preview is more variable based on the voice chosen

Swedish is just wholly American.

German sounds okay.

There's lots of great german voices here which should be better: https://elevenlabs.io/app/voice-library/collections/SHEPnUB9...

The voice selection matters a lot for this research preview

I tried German in the preview box there, and it had a very strong English accent.

I listened to a story about dragons.

It sounded okay. Only in the middle somewhere, the loudness seemed to change drastically.

Not a native speaker by any stretch, but all the voices sounded like 'intercom announcer' or 'phone assistant' to me. Not natural in the slightest.

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