Why I use non-American English voices in my text to speech

I am glad to see I&#x27;m not the only one who has done this!<p>Ever since my first Garmin GPS, I have always switched to the Australian accented English because it &#x27;felt the most accurate&#x27;. But thinking about it now, it&#x27;s clear the reason was that US and British English is so common to my ears that I noticed every flaw. Australian was just unfamiliar enough to have me focusing on decoding the street names rather than noticing the unnatural gap between two phenomes.

This is the second time I&#x27;ve seen &quot;chock it up&quot; instead of &quot;chalk it up&quot; in the last 2 days. Is this a regional thing?

Alternatively - use the OS X &#x27;Fred&#x27; voice (or even &#x27;Zarvox&#x27;). It&#x27;s been around since 1990, and it sounds like a robot should, not like a robot trying to sound like a human.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PlainTalk</a>

I&#x27;ve noticed while traveling that American English is actually rather difficult to understand. My slurmumbling west coast accent with no consonants or spaces between words is basically undecipherable in a lot of places.<p>So I pull out my Cheesy Irish Accent. That thing works wonders. Words all start with a capital letter, and have gaps between them. You speak louder and more decisively. It&#x27;s really the perfect form of speech, apart from the embarrassment of having other native English speakers (or god forbid Irishmen) hear you do it. And you get to talk like a Pirate. What&#x27;s not to love?<p>Give it a try next time you&#x27;re abroad!

Yeah, the problem we found is that when we switched to non-American English, Siri expects us to be speaking it as well... and messes up what she understands.

I am Australian and use the British. The Australian doesn&#x27;t sound right. How lucky we are to have so many mutually understandable yet varied accents. I wish they had more UK and US regional accents for a bit of variation.

So the idea is to add <i>more</i> errors, so the other errors don&#x27;t seem so lonely? That makes the system more usable?

I&#x27;m Australian and the Australian voice sounds so bad to me. I have to use American English.

This is interesting. I&#x27;m an Italian native speaker. Sometimes GPS voices have a very marked accent (usually from Milan). To me it ends up sounding parodic rather than soothing (I&#x27;m from Rome).

I was wondering if received pronunciation was an available option.

I&#x27;ve wondered if foreign humans sometimes fall <i>into</i> uncanny valley in their vocalising and behaviours, and then seem extra alien and &#x27;wrong&#x27;.

Does anyone else have issues when dictating phone numbers to be dialled??<p>If I tell Siri to call &quot;1800528555&quot; it will interpret this as &quot;Call 18005 to 8555&quot;<p>Fail...<p>What am I doing wrong?

this is the same exact reason i use &quot;amy&quot; from ivona for my morning commute. as a non-brit, rather than frustratingly hard to understand, listening to her instead is totally dreamy...<p>that, and she doesn&#x27;t stumble over names like &quot;Abalamahalamatandra&quot;.

&quot;Turn right on El Camino rEal&quot;, said Siri&#x27;s sister from UK.

I use South African &quot;Tessa&quot; on my Mac. Until now, I&#x27;d never understood why I preferred her - this explanation makes so much sense!

&gt;<i>Anyone who works regularly with people from other countries will recognize this right away. Your brain goes into a sort of fuzzy recognition mode searching for meaning rather than critiquing flaws.</i><p>This is an interesting reason. I have always noticed that the British and Australian accented voices sounded better. I though that perhaps it was easier to emulate their pronunciations.<p>Would the inverse hold true for British&#x2F;Australian people as well? Does US English sound the best to them in TTS applications?