You can design a Standard French AI voice with one prompt
Describe the accent, gender, age and delivery in one sentence and Gradium returns a Standard French voice id you call from the API or the SDK. The library already carries 81 Standard French voices, and Voice Design covers whatever it does not.
France French, standard French, français standard, Metropolitan French and standard french all describe the same voice. Write it as French in your prompt.
Hear it
- 0:00
“Regarde-moi ça, le vieux port est encore plein de monde ce soir, c'est incroyable.”
The prompt
that produced it
A General French female voice, 25 to 35: varied pitch, unhurried pace, boisterous energy and a textured distinctive timbre. Accent detail: uvular r, nasal vowels held distinct, phrase-final stress. Ideal for game and character work.
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
The same accent at 5
from one prompt
Age is the part of a voice a fixed library cannot vary. Written into the prompt, it comes back in the voice.
- French, 5French0:00
Une petite fille française de 5 ans, de France, voix très aiguë et fluette, joyeuse et un peu zozotante, qui parle vite avec l'enthousiasme d'une enfant de maternelle.
The prompt that produced the clip above.
Standard 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 Uvular R: it is the feature a mid-range read is most likely to soften, and the one a listener places Standard French by.
A 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 Standard French it usually costs uvular r.
A 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 Nasal vowels, which a support brief tends to flatten.
A 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 Standard French is no exception: push it and listen for whether uvular r survives.
A 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 Standard French
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- Uvular R
- The French /r/ is a uvular fricative produced at the back of the throat, not the alveolar tap of Spanish or Italian. Getting this wrong is the fastest way to make a French voice sound like a non-native speaker reading French.
- Nasal vowels
- French carries four nasal vowels with no English equivalent, in words like vin, vent, bon and brun. They are structural rather than decorative, and a prompt that pushes for breathiness can smear the distinction between them.
- Phrase-final stress
- Stress falls at the end of the rhythmic group rather than on a fixed syllable within each word. This produces the even, forward-moving cadence people describe as French, and it is why pace instructions land differently here than in English.
- Descriptors do not transfer
- Energetic and bright travel intact, but most descriptors resolve to a different sound in French than they do in English, so a French brief has to be written in French terms rather than translated from one that worked.
81 Standard French 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.
- Albane
Adult · Female
Features a polished, clinical precision with a steady cadence that conveys professional reliability.
0:00b-1LP0pKWL1tNgml - Amandine
Adult · Female
A versatile and joyful French adult voice capable of shifting from warm education to playful character work.
0:00NvHEAMGiPT4u8iT- - Amélie
Young Adult · Female
A friendly voice with a clear tone and pleasant pitch.
0:00J4XbCGPYNMigXcfZ
Another 77 Standard French voices are in the catalogue. Sign in to hear them all, or design one to your own spec from a prompt.
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 | 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.
- Asking for very careful articulation suppresses schwa deletion, and the read stops sounding like spoken French.
- Ask for clarity of consonants rather than of every syllable. Compression is part of the accent.
- Using an English reference for warmth or authority pulls the uvular r towards an English approximant, which immediately reads as non-native.
- Keep every reference inside French and describe the acoustic quality you want directly.
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 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 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.
Uvular R above all: The French /r/ is a uvular fricative produced at the back of the throat, not the alveolar tap of Spanish or Italian. Getting this wrong is the fastest way to make a French voice sound like a non-native speaker reading French.
81 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. 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 Standard 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 Standard French, the feature that decides it is usually Uvular R.
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.