Setting up a French voice
- Record 5 to 15 seconds of a native speaker, in the accent your audience expects.
- Set the voice's Language to French.
- Test with lines that include liaisons, numbers and a question.
Accent and region
The accent is the sample's. A voice cloned from a speaker from Montréal sounds Québécois, one from Dakar or Abidjan sounds West African. Vocabulary is the script's job: courriel or e-mail, déjeuner for lunch or breakfast, septante or soixante-dix. Write the words your audience uses.
Writing French for the voice
- Numbers as words: soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-dix; or septante and nonante for Belgium and Switzerland. Writing them out decides which is read.
- Dates and times: le trois mars, quatorze heures trente rather than 3/3, 14 h 30. Ordinals: 1er → premier.
- Accents change words: ou / où, a / à, du / dû, sur / sûr. Keep every one.
- Liaisons and elision: write elisions properly (l'homme, j'ai, qu'il). The voice usually gets liaisons right; check them on h aspiré words like les héros, which take none.
- Abbreviations: M. → monsieur, Mme → madame, p. ex. → par exemple, etc. → et cetera.
- Punctuation: French spacing before ? ! : ; is fine. Colons and semicolons are read as short pauses, like commas.
A passage to record
Ça fait des semaines que je voulais enregistrer ça, alors allons-y. C'est une soirée tranquille, le café est prêt,
et j'ai enfin quelques minutes pour moi. Voyons ce que ça donne.
"I'd been meaning to record this for weeks, so here goes. It's a quiet evening, the coffee's ready, and I finally have a few minutes to myself. Let's see how it turns out."
A dialogue to test with
Claire: Tu es déjà là ? Je t'attends depuis huit heures.
Julien: Désolé ! Il y avait des bouchons partout.
Claire: Bon, tu es arrivé. On commande ?English names in French
A French voice reads English names and brands the French way. If you want the English pronunciation, respell the name phonetically for a French reader, or give that line to a voice set to English.