You can design a Belgian French AI voice with one prompt
Describe the accent, gender, age and delivery in one sentence and Gradium returns a Belgian French voice id you call from the API or the SDK. Every Belgian French voice is built to order, so the age, gender and delivery are yours to specify rather than picked from a shelf.
Belgium French, Brussels accent, Walloon French and belgian french all describe the same voice. Write it as Belgian French in your prompt.
Hear it
- Belgian French0:00
“Franchement, je n'y avais pas pensé comme ça, mais maintenant que tu le dis, ça explique beaucoup de choses.”
The prompt
that produced it
Une voix de femme belge de 28 ans, douce et directe, phrasé légèrement chantant, accent bruxellois discret.
A worked example: change any part of it and the voice changes with it. The four styles below show what moving pitch, pace, energy or purpose does to the same accent.
- Pitch2/5
- lowhigh
- Pace3/5
- slowfast
- Energy3/5
- calmboisterous
Belgian French
in four styles
A prompt is built from parts: the accent, the age, then pitch, pace, energy and what the voice is for. Change one part and you get a variation. These four are starting points to adapt, not finished prompts.
Everything to the middle. Watch The HUIT vowel: it is the feature a mid-range read is most likely to soften, and the one a listener places Belgian French by.
A Belgian French male voice, 30 to 45, for customer service: easy and unforced, with mid pitch, steady natural pacing, medium energy and a natural unforced resonance. Ideal for voice agents, assistants and dialogue that has to sound unscripted.
In colour: the 9 parts that make this style.
Pitch, pace and energy drop together. Moving one alone produces a voice performing gravity rather than carrying it, and in Belgian French it usually costs the huit vowel.
A Belgian French male voice, 45 to 60, for customer service: clean, deliberate and precise, with low pitch, slow pacing, low energy and deep resonant timbre. Ideal for audiobooks, documentary and long-form narration.
In colour: the 9 parts that make this style.
Warmth belongs in the resonance rather than the energy. Keep an ear on Long vowels are longer, which a support brief tends to flatten.
A Belgian French male voice, 35 to 50, for customer service: calm and crisp, with mid-low pitch, steady natural pacing, medium energy and warm rounded resonance. Ideal for reassuring walkthroughs and empathic de-escalation.
In colour: the 10 parts that make this style.
Check this by ear before committing. How much energy an accent carries before it reads as theatrical varies sharply, and Belgian French is no exception: push it and listen for whether the huit vowel survives.
A Belgian French male voice, 25 to 35, for customer service: bright and punchy, with mid-high pitch, fast pacing, high energy and bright forward resonance. Ideal for advertising reads and social video.
In colour: the 9 parts that make this style.
What makes Belgian French
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- The HUIT vowel
- Belgian French keeps a distinct glide in words like huit and lui where Parisian has levelled it. It is subtle but consistent, and it is one of the first things a French listener places.
- Long vowels are longer
- Vowel length distinctions that Parisian has largely lost remain productive, so certain words hold noticeably longer. This lengthens lines without slowing the pace, so a slow pace value on top overshoots.
- Septante and nonante
- Belgian French uses septante and nonante for seventy and ninety, where Parisian uses the compound forms. This belongs in the script rather than the prompt, and it is worth including if the voice will read numbers.
- Measured default tempo
- Belgian French is typically delivered a step slower than Parisian, with more complete articulation. That makes it a strong choice for announcement and instructional work where Parisian compression would cost clarity.
Design your own custom Belgian French voice
for your use case
Voice Design generates Belgian French voices to order, so you specify the age, gender and delivery you need rather than choosing from a shelf. This is the difference between a voice library and a voice model: a library can only offer you what it already holds, while Voice Design builds the accent on request.
The prompt,
and where it goes wrong
The method behind the prompt: what each clause does, what breaks it, and what it was tested on.
Each row is one part of the prompt above and what it is set to here. Change a single row and you get a variation on this voice; change several and you get a different one.
| Clause | This prompt |
|---|---|
| Accent / localechanged | Belgian French |
| Gender | male |
| Age range | 40 to 55 |
| Purpose | customer service |
| Character | calm and crisp |
| Pitch | mid-low pitch |
| Pace | steady natural pacing |
| Energy | medium energy |
| Resonance / timbre | warm rounded resonance |
| Applications | reassuring walkthroughs, empathic de-escalation and complex IT support |
2 failure modes we hit repeatedly, and what fixes each one.
- Adding slow pacing on top of the longer vowels overshoots and the read drags.
- Keep pace neutral. Belgian French is already a step slower than Parisian without any instruction.
- Auditioning on a script with no numbers hides septante and nonante, which is often exactly why the accent was chosen.
- Put numbers in the line if the voice will read them.
Descriptor words do not transfer between languages. Energetic and bright travel intact, but most resolve to a different sound depending on the language they are read in, so a brief that produced a warm voice in one language will not produce the equivalent warmth translated into another. Write it in French terms rather than translating one that worked elsewhere.
Writing your first prompt? How to write a voice prompt covers every part a prompt can carry, and what each one changes.
Questions?
Answered
A Belgian French male voice, 40 to 55, for customer service: calm and crisp, with mid-low pitch, steady natural pacing, medium energy and warm rounded resonance. Ideal for reassuring walkthroughs, empathic de-escalation and complex IT support. Name the accent as Belgian French, then set the age, the pitch, the pace, the energy and what the voice is for. Every accent Gradium maps is reached the same way.
The HUIT vowel above all: Belgian French keeps a distinct glide in words like huit and lui where Parisian has levelled it. It is subtle but consistent, and it is one of the first things a French listener places.
Describe it and Voice Design builds it. Voice Design generates Belgian French voices to order, so you specify the age, gender and delivery you need rather than choosing from a shelf. One prompt returns a voice id you can call from the API straight away.
Those are names for the same territory, and this page covers them. Belgian French is the wording Gradium maps, so that is what to name in the prompt, but a brief written in any of these terms lands in the same place.
Both. Gender is its own part of the prompt, so it changes on its own: swap male for female and everything else holds. Same accent, same age, same delivery, different voice.
Yes. A designed voice is generated rather than cloned from a person, so there is no actor to license and no session to re-book when the script changes.
Hear Belgian French
in the studio
Every voice we ship clears blind listener comparison and an ELO ranking first, because roughly one candidate in a thousand has it. For Belgian French, the feature that decides it is usually The HUIT vowel.
Paste the prompt, change the parts that matter to you, and generate. No recording, no casting, no licensing.