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Show HN: A free online British accent generator for instant voice conversion (audioconvert.ai)

25 points by Katherine603 ↗ HN
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.

18 comments

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pjc50
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.

ladybro
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)

laccybandball
"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?
anovikov
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.

OJFord
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.)

kumarski
This needs a Roadman accent. Plz.

Awesome stuff.

GJim
"British accent"

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

Kichererbsen
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...
mkarliner
Magnetic Man is unmistakably American, and annoying with it.
roywiggins
“authentic” might not be the right adjective, surely the whole point is that they're synthetic
stevage
"Magnetic man" is uh, not British.
thorio
Shows an error for me on Chrome Mobile
martinclayton
I was expecting regional accent options, so disappointed.
gwbas1c
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.

nipperkinfeet
Failed to generate speech. Please try again. :(