You can design a Scottish AI voice with one prompt
Describe the accent, gender, age and delivery in one sentence and Gradium returns a Scottish voice id you call from the API or the SDK. Every Scottish voice is built to order, so the age, gender and delivery are yours to specify rather than picked from a shelf.
Scots accent, Glaswegian accent, Highland accent, Edinburgh accent and scottish all describe the same voice. Write it as Scottish 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 Scottish male voice, 40 to 50: mid-low pitch, steady natural pacing, medium energy and warm rounded resonance. Accent detail: tapped r fully pronounced, monophthongal FACE and GOAT, clipped vowel length. Ideal for reassuring walkthroughs and empathic de-escalation.
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
Scottish
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 Strongly rhotic with a tap or trill: it is the feature a mid-range read is most likely to soften, and the one a listener places Scottish by.
A Scottish 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 Scottish it usually costs strongly rhotic with a tap or trill.
A Scottish 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 Monophthongal FACE and GOAT, which a support brief tends to flatten.
A Scottish 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 Scottish is no exception: push it and listen for whether strongly rhotic with a tap or trill survives.
A Scottish 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 Scottish
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- Strongly rhotic with a tap or trill
- Post-vocalic r is present and often tapped or trilled, which is a different consonant from the American approximant. This is the first thing a listener registers and it is why an American reference in the prompt actively fights the accent.
- Monophthongal FACE and GOAT
- The vowels in face and goat are held steady rather than glided, so face leans towards fehs and boat towards boht. Requesting a smooth or gliding delivery blurs exactly this.
- The velar fricative in loch
- Scottish English keeps the ch of loch as a real velar fricative, a sound absent from most other English varieties. It appears rarely, but when it does it is decisive.
- Scottish vowel length rule
- Vowel length is governed by the following consonant rather than being fixed per vowel, which gives the accent its distinctive clipped rhythm. A slow pace value works against this and can make the read sound laboured.
Design your own custom Scottish voice
for your use case
Voice Design generates Scottish 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 | Scottish 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.
- Asking for a smooth or gliding delivery flattens the monophthongal FACE and GOAT vowels and softens the tapped r.
- Ask for clarity rather than smoothness. The accent's character is in held vowels and a hard r, both of which smoothness removes.
- Requesting a slow read fights the Scottish vowel length rule, which governs length by the following consonant rather than by tempo.
- Keep pace neutral. Slowing the whole line makes the rhythm sound laboured instead of measured.
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 Scottish 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 Scottish 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.
Strongly rhotic with a tap or trill above all: Post-vocalic r is present and often tapped or trilled, which is a different consonant from the American approximant. This is the first thing a listener registers and it is why an American reference in the prompt actively fights the accent.
Describe it and Voice Design builds it. Voice Design generates Scottish 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. Scottish 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 Scottish
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 Scottish, the feature that decides it is usually Strongly rhotic with a tap or trill.
Paste the prompt, change the parts that matter to you, and generate. No recording, no casting, no licensing.