You can design a Canadian AI voice with one prompt
Describe the accent, gender, age and delivery in one sentence and Gradium returns a Canadian voice id you call from the API or the SDK. The library already carries 1 Canadian voice, and Voice Design covers whatever it does not.
Canadian English, Canuck accent, Toronto accent and canadian all describe the same voice. Write it as Canadian English in your prompt.
Hear it
- 0:00
“Take a breath. I need your full name and your date of birth before we go any further.”
The prompt
that produced it
A Canadian female voice, 30 to 40: mid pitch, steady natural pacing, medium energy and an easy unforced resonance. Accent detail: raising audible on about and price, fully rhotic, crisp final consonants. Ideal for natural dialogue and voice agents.
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.
- Pitch1/5
- lowhigh
- Pace2/5
- slowfast
- Energy2/5
- calmboisterous
Canadian
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 Canadian raising: it is the feature a mid-range read is most likely to soften, and the one a listener places Canadian by.
A Canadian English male voice, 30 to 45: 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 Canadian it usually costs canadian raising.
A Canadian English male voice, 45 to 60: 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 Low back merger, which a support brief tends to flatten.
A Canadian English 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 Canadian is no exception: push it and listen for whether canadian raising survives.
A Canadian English male voice, 25 to 35: 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 Canadian
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- Canadian raising
- Before voiceless consonants the diphthongs in price and mouth raise, so about leans towards aboot and nice towards nighce. It is the definitive marker, and it only appears in that phonetic context, which is why a script needs the right words to expose it.
- Low back merger
- The vowels in cot and caught fully merge, as in much of the western United States. This means the accent shares more with General American than most listeners expect, and the distinguishing work falls almost entirely on raising.
- Rhotic, with clear final consonants
- Post-vocalic r is pronounced and word-final consonants stay crisper than in General American. A slightly precise articulation value therefore suits Canadian where it would read as formal in American.
- Only one library voice today
- The catalogue carries a single Canadian voice, so this accent is served by Voice Design rather than by browsing. That is the practical difference between a library and a model: the accent is reachable on request even where the shelf is empty.
1 Canadian voices
already in the library
Ready to call with no design step. Hear a few here, then open any in the studio or write a prompt of your own.
- Max
Young Adult · Male
A clear calm and measured male voice.
0:00NoJdNY6JTz-VJLwz
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 | Canadian English |
| Gender | male |
| Age range | 55 to 65 |
| Character | clean, deliberate and precise |
| Pitch | low pitch |
| Pace | slow pacing |
| Energy | low-to-mid energy |
| Resonance / timbre | resonant timbre |
| Modifiers | a gentle low-to-high flow |
| Applications | projecting academic authority |
2 failure modes we hit repeatedly, and what fixes each one.
- Auditioning on a script with no raising context leaves the accent indistinguishable from General American, because raising only appears before voiceless consonants.
- Put about, out, price and nice in the audition line. Without those words there is nothing for a listener to place.
- Asking for a British or American reference to add warmth pulls the accent to one side or the other, since Canadian sits between them.
- Keep references inside the accent and get warmth from the resonance.
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 English 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 Canadian English male voice, 55 to 65: clean, deliberate and precise, with low pitch, slow pacing, low-to-mid energy, resonant timbre and a gentle low-to-high flow. Ideal for projecting academic authority. Name the accent as Canadian English, 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.
Canadian raising above all: Before voiceless consonants the diphthongs in price and mouth raise, so about leans towards aboot and nice towards nighce. It is the definitive marker, and it only appears in that phonetic context, which is why a script needs the right words to expose it.
1 are ready to call today, with no design step: pick a voice id and go. Design one when you want an age, texture or persona of your own.
Those are names for the same territory, and this page covers them. Canadian English 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 Canadian
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 Canadian, the feature that decides it is usually Canadian raising.
Open a voice, type your own script, and listen. Then write a prompt of your own to design a variant. No recording, no casting, no licensing.