You can design a Southern French AI voice with one prompt
Describe the accent, gender, age and delivery in one sentence and Gradium returns a Southern French voice id you call from the API or the SDK. Every Southern French voice is built to order, so the age, gender and delivery are yours to specify rather than picked from a shelf.
Marseille accent, Marseillais, Provençal accent, accent du Midi and southern french all describe the same voice. Write it as Southern French in your prompt.
Hear it
- Southern French0:00
“Regarde-moi ça ! Le Vieux-Port est encore plein de monde ce soir, c'est incroyable. On va s'asseoir en terrasse pour manger une bonne.”
The prompt
that produced it
Une voix d'homme marseillais de 74 ans, chaleureuse et généreuse, accent méridional marqué, voyelles finales chantantes, débit lent.
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
Southern 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 Final schwas are pronounced: it is the feature a mid-range read is most likely to soften, and the one a listener places Southern French by.
A Southern 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 Southern French it usually costs final schwas are pronounced.
A Southern 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 gain a consonant, which a support brief tends to flatten.
A Southern 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 Southern French is no exception: push it and listen for whether final schwas are pronounced survives.
A Southern 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 Southern French
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- Final schwas are pronounced
- Where Parisian drops the final e, southern French sounds it, so une petite fille gains syllables. This single difference changes the syllable count of every line and is the accent's clearest marker.
- Nasal vowels gain a consonant
- The nasal vowels are partly denasalised and followed by an audible velar nasal, so pain leans towards paing. It is the feature most associated with the Midi and it is immediately recognisable to any French listener.
- Sing-song contour
- Southern French carries wider pitch movement across the phrase than Parisian, which is the accent's warmth. Requesting a flat or neutral read pulls it back towards the capital.
- More even syllable weight
- Because final schwas survive, syllables sit closer to equal weight and the rhythm evens out. A fast pace value therefore reads differently here than in Parisian, where compression is doing the speeding up.
Design your own custom Southern French voice
for your use case
The catalogue tags voices at the parent-accent level, so any southern french voices roll up under Standard French. Voice Design maps this accent, so the page routes to the designer. 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 | Southern 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.
- Timing a script to a Parisian read comes out short, because sounded final schwas add syllables to almost every line.
- Time the script against this accent, not against Parisian. The syllable count genuinely differs.
- Requesting a flat or neutral contour removes the wider pitch movement and pulls the accent back towards the capital.
- Keep energy at medium or above. The melody is the reason to choose the south.
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 Southern 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 Southern 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.
Final schwas are pronounced above all: Where Parisian drops the final e, southern French sounds it, so une petite fille gains syllables. This single difference changes the syllable count of every line and is the accent's clearest marker.
Describe it and Voice Design builds it. The catalogue tags voices at the parent-accent level, so any southern french voices roll up under Standard French. Voice Design maps this accent, so the page routes to the designer. 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. Southern 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 Southern 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 Southern French, the feature that decides it is usually Final schwas are pronounced.
Paste the prompt, change the parts that matter to you, and generate. No recording, no casting, no licensing.