You can design a Quebecois French AI voice with one prompt
Describe the accent, gender, age and delivery in one sentence and Gradium returns a Quebecois French voice id you call from the API or the SDK. The library already carries 6 Quebecois French voices, and Voice Design covers whatever it does not.
Québécois, Quebec French, Canadian French, Joual and quebecois french all describe the same voice. Write it as Quebecois French in your prompt.
Hear it
- MaudeQuebecois French0:00
The prompt
that produced it
A Quebecois French female 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.
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 45
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.
- Québécois, 45French0:00
Une voix d'homme québécois de 45 ans, posée et chaleureuse, au débit tranquille, accent québécois bien marqué.
The prompt that produced the clip above.
Quebecois 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 Affrication before close front vowels: it is the feature a mid-range read is most likely to soften, and the one a listener places Quebecois French by.
A Quebecois 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 Quebecois French it usually costs affrication before close front vowels.
A Quebecois 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 Diphthongised long vowels, which a support brief tends to flatten.
A Quebecois 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 Quebecois French is no exception: push it and listen for whether affrication before close front vowels survives.
A Quebecois 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 Quebecois French
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- Affrication before close front vowels
- The /t/ and /d/ become ts and dz before /i/ and /y/, so tu approaches tsu and dire approaches dzire. This is the single feature that separates Quebecois from Standard French in the first few words of any script.
- Diphthongised long vowels
- Long vowels break into glides, so pere and fete carry movement that Parisian French holds steady. It reads as warmer and more informal, which is why Quebecois suits conversational work better than formal announcement.
- More open vowel space
- The vowels in patte and pate stay clearly distinct, and several vowels sit lower and further back than their European equivalents. A prompt asking for a polished or broadcast read tends to pull these back towards Parisian values.
- Not a French accent with substitutions
- Quebecois is a distinct variety, not Standard French with a few swaps. Asking for French and then requesting a Canadian flavour produces an unconvincing hybrid, so name Quebecois in the prompt from the start.
6 Quebecois 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.
Another 3 Quebecois 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 | Quebecois 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 French and then a Canadian flavour produces an unconvincing hybrid rather than Quebecois.
- Name Quebecois in the prompt from the start. It is a distinct variety, not Parisian with substitutions.
- Requesting a polished or broadcast read pulls the diphthongised long vowels back towards Parisian values.
- Ask for warmth or ease instead. Polish is the one direction that erases this accent.
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 Quebecois 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 Quebecois 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.
Affrication before close front vowels above all: The /t/ and /d/ become ts and dz before /i/ and /y/, so tu approaches tsu and dire approaches dzire. This is the single feature that separates Quebecois from Standard French in the first few words of any script.
6 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. Quebecois 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 Quebecois 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 Quebecois French, the feature that decides it is usually Affrication before close front vowels.
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.