November 16, 2019
Call Scotland’s mission is to help children across Scotland overcome disabilities and barriers to learning. The project, funded by the Scottish government, was to create 2 Scottish accented natural female and male child voices. Call Scotland a close partner of CereProc, approached our speech synthesis experts with the project to give Scottish children the ability to speak in their regional accent.
Learn more about the The Scottish Voice Project here
Recording and creating authentic child voices is a more complex process than using a adult voice talent. Scripts need to be made age appropriate, child voice actors work for shorter periods of time, and their voices can change radically over the space of a year. CereProc were the first to produce accented English child voices. The recording script contained Scottish regional slang for the vocal gestures such as “Gonnae no dae that!” and “bampot!” to give the voices a more authentic feel.
Voice is a key part of your identity reflecting where you come from, your age and personality. For children it is incredibly difficult to find an age appropriate regional accent. Neural speech synthesis has made voice cloning much easier and now there are less challenges for producing unique accented voices. CereProc is very proud of the work it did to make synthesis of accents and different ages available and in doing so changing the expectations of users everywhere.