French AI Voices

Liaison is what separates fluent from foreign

French joins its words together and the rules are not uniform. Some liaisons are obligatory — les amis with a linking z, un grand homme with a t where the d is written. Some are forbidden, and the forbidden ones are what catch synthetic speech out: et never links to what follows, and h aspiré blocks the link, which is why les héros and les zéros must not sound alike. The engine is reliable on the common cases and worth auditioning on anything ornate.

The same joining behaviour is why written French and spoken French diverge so much in plurals. Il parle and ils parlent are identical aloud; the number lives in the article, not the verb. When you are writing for the ear, that is a real constraint on what a sentence can carry, and it is a good reason to prefer short declaratives to the long relative clauses French prose enjoys.

The voices are not all from Paris

Québécois French differs from Metropolitan French in vowels, in diphthongs that Metropolitan French does not have, and in a great deal of vocabulary. Belgian and Swiss voices are closer to Metropolitan but carry their own tells, the most quotable being the numbers: septante and nonante for seventy and ninety, where France says soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix. A character who counts is a character who has told you where they are from.

This is worth using rather than avoiding. There is no accent setting, but when auditioning turns up a Québécois voice for the Montréal cousin, keeping it costs you nothing and does work that pages of description cannot. It also means the reverse is a real risk: an unaudited cast can put a Québécois voice in a story set in Lyon without anyone noticing until a French listener does.

Worth knowing before you cast at all, however small the scene: the twenty-three are not all francophone voices. Thirteen are — five from France, four from Québec, two Belgian and two Swiss — and the other ten are multilingual voices whose first language is something else and which speak French competently rather than natively. Which group a character lands in is decided by its age and gender, not by how big your cast is: each character is matched into the part of the pitch range that suits its age band, and wherever the francophone voices are thin in that band a multilingual voice is the first choice rather than a fallback. Fifteen of the forty library characters start there in French. So audition per character — a two-hander meets a multilingual voice as readily as a twenty-strong ensemble does.

Tu and vous, and the missing band

The move from vous to tu is the French relationship beat, and like every such device it lives in your script rather than in the casting layer. On ne va pas se vouvoyer is a scene. Keep the voice constant through it — the point is that the person has not changed, only the distance has.

French has no true children's voices. A child character goes to the highest-pitched adult voice of its gender — for Milo, the nine-year-old boy, that is an Italian multilingual voice; at best it reads as youthful rather than as a child, and direction does not close the gap. For children's storytelling in French, the workable adaptation is to write the young roles as teenagers and let a warm adult narrator carry the rest.