You can design an Irish AI voice with one prompt
Describe the accent, gender, age and delivery in one sentence. Gradium returns a voice id you call from the API or the SDK, with no recording and no actor licensing. The prompt below is the one that produced Fionn, the voice in the sample.
Irish brogue, Dublin accent, Cork accent, Hiberno-English and irish all describe the same voice. Write it as Irish English in your prompt.
Hear it
- FionnIrish0:00
“I completely understand your concern, and I want you to know we'll take care of this properly, so just relax and I'll walk you through every step from here.”
The prompt
that produced it
An Irish English 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.
This exact wording produced Fionn, a English · Ireland voice now in the Gradium library, which is live in the library as aokR6uVODdJ2FZSQ.
- Pitch2/5
- lowhigh
- Pace3/5
- slowfast
- Energy3/5
- calmboisterous
Irish
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.
The prompt as written. Mid-low pitch with steady pacing and medium energy is the combination that reads as attentive rather than authoritative, which is why Irish is so often picked for support lines.
An Irish English 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.
Copy this as it stands.
Slow the pace and drop the energy but leave the pitch alone. Irish carries more pitch movement inside a phrase than Standard British, and that movement is what keeps a slow read from going flat.
An Irish English male voice, 40 to 55, for long-form narration: warm and unhurried, with mid-low pitch, slow pacing, low-to-mid energy and warm rounded resonance. Ideal for audiobooks, documentary and history.
In colour: the 5 parts that make this style.
The direction Irish takes most naturally, because the sing-song contour is already there. Push the age down as well as the energy up, or you get an older voice performing enthusiasm.
An Irish English male voice, 25 to 35, for customer service: bright and quick, with mid pitch, fast pacing, high energy and warm rounded resonance. Ideal for reassuring walkthroughs, empathic de-escalation and complex IT support.
In colour: the 5 parts that make this style.
The hardest direction for this accent. Stripping the energy out removes the warmth that made you choose Irish, so consider Standard British instead if the brief is genuinely institutional.
An Irish English male voice, 40 to 55, for customer service: measured and precise, with mid-low pitch, steady natural pacing, low energy and warm rounded resonance. Ideal for public announcements, compliance and banking.
In colour: the 3 parts that make this style.
What makes Irish
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- Dental stopping of TH
- The th in think and this is produced as a dental /t/ and /d/, so think approaches tink. It is the feature listeners name first, and the showcase Fionn voice carries it while still reading as clear and professional.
- Rhotic
- Unlike Standard British, Irish English keeps post-vocalic /r/, though it is lighter and less retroflex than American. This puts Irish in a useful middle position: it reads warm without the regional weight of a British accent or the neutrality of American.
- KIT and STRUT quality
- The vowels in kit and strut are more centralised, and the vowel in words like Dublin sits between British and American values. This is part of why Irish is so often chosen for customer service: it sounds attentive rather than authoritative.
- Rising, sing-song contour
- Irish English carries more pitch movement inside a phrase than Standard British, with frequent gentle rises mid-sentence. Requesting a flat or monotone read strips out exactly the quality that makes the accent worth choosing.
7 Irish 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.
- Aoife
Adult · Female
Bright and engaging Irish English voice with lively, natural pacing. Ideal for interactive voice assistants and friendly customer service applications.
0:00vimnD4UQG_36P43U - Saoirse
Adult · Female
Warm and natural Irish English voice, perfect for conversational applications. Delivers with excellent clarity and genuine emotional expressiveness.
0:00gqn4ytOULe-TQfjl - Cormac
Adult · Male
Bright and warm Irish English voice with cheerful, natural pacing. Ideal for welcoming customer service applications.
0:00JuMRs5W5S52hzuge - Declan
Adult · Male
Calm and confident Irish English voice with steady, natural pacing. Ideal for reassuring customer support applications.
0:00I7GYfpcKbafFrYUv
Another 2 Irish 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 / locale | Irish English |
| 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 |
4 failure modes we hit repeatedly, and what fixes each one.
- Asking for a stage-Irish or storybook read produces caricature. The model will oblige, and the result is unusable for anything customer-facing.
- Describe the acoustic qualities rather than the character. Calm and crisp with warm rounded resonance gets you an Irish professional; jovial and lilting gets you a leprechaun.
- Requesting a flat or monotone delivery strips out the pitch movement inside the phrase, which is the feature that makes Irish read as attentive.
- Keep energy at medium or above and control the tempo with the pace instead. Fionn sits at 3 on energy for exactly this reason.
- Naming a city, such as Dublin or Cork, gets an unreliable approximation, because those labels are not in the mapped set.
- Use Irish and shape the register with the other clauses. The accent the rewriter maps is Irish English; sub-regional labels are not.
- Mixing in a British reference to sound more neutral pulls the accent towards Standard British and drops the rhoticity, so the r disappears mid-line.
- Keep every reference inside the accent. Irish keeps post-vocalic r while British does not, and that single feature is doing a lot of the work.
Descriptor words do not transfer between locales. Energetic and bright travel intact, but most descriptors resolve to a different sound depending on the language they are read in. Irish sits inside English, so the English vocabulary applies, but the same brief written for French would need rewriting rather than translating.
Writing your first prompt? How to write a voice prompt covers every part a prompt can carry, and what each one changes.
Questions?
Answered
"An Irish English 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." That is the exact prompt that produced Fionn, the voice in the sample above.
It reads as attentive rather than authoritative. Irish English keeps post-vocalic r like American but carries more pitch movement inside a phrase than Standard British, and that combination sounds like someone listening rather than someone announcing. It is the reason our Irish catalogue skews towards support and conversational work.
Not as named accents. The rewriter maps Irish English, and asking for a city yields an approximation we would not stand behind. Shape the register with the age, character and energy instead.
Both exist. The library carries Irish voices you can call immediately, and they are listed on the Irish voice library page. Design one when you want a specific age, a particular texture, or a voice that is yours alone rather than shared.
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.
Hear Irish
in the studio
A designed voice is a normal voice id: same endpoints, same SDK, same latency as any library voice. Every voice we ship clears blind listener comparison and an ELO ranking first, because roughly one candidate in a thousand has it.
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.