You can design a British 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, no casting and no actor licensing. The prompt below is the one that produced Freya, the voice in the sample.
RP, Received Pronunciation, Queen's English, King's English and standard british all describe the same voice. Write it as British in your prompt.
Hear it
- FreyaStandard British0:00
“Okay babes, gather round, because I have found the most gorgeous little cafe tucked down a side street in Brighton and honestly you are going to obsess over it, I promise!”
The prompt
that produced it
A British female voice, 20 to 30, glossy and confident, with girly chatter, high pitch, fast pacing, high energy and bright sparkling resonance. Ideal for a friendly receptionist or assistant.
This exact wording produced Freya, a English · GB voice now in the Gradium library, which is live in the library as GgfEkEJtxZR7gnpy.
- Pitch5/5
- lowhigh
- Pace4/5
- slowfast
- Energy5/5
- calmboisterous
The same accent at 8
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.
- British, 8English0:00
A British boy of about 8 years old from England, bright and excited, a small high voice, quick and a little breathless, telling a friend about his day.
The prompt that produced the clip above.
Standard British
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. High pitch, fast pacing and bright resonance read as welcoming and quick rather than authoritative: right for front-of-house, wrong for narration.
A British female voice, 20 to 30: glossy and confident, with high pitch, fast pacing, high energy, bright sparkling resonance and girly chatter. Ideal for a friendly receptionist or assistant.
Copy this as it stands.
Pull all three axes towards the middle. This is the single most common adjustment people make to a British prompt, because the default British read is livelier than most business content wants.
A British female voice, 20 to 30: warm and measured, with mid pitch, steady natural pacing, low-to-mid energy, bright sparkling resonance and girly chatter. Ideal for corporate training, internal comms and explainer video.
In colour: the 5 parts that make this style.
Age and pitch move together. Asking for gravity without moving the age range tends to produce a young voice performing gravity, which listeners hear as acting.
A British female voice, 40 to 55: clean, deliberate and precise, with low pitch, slow pacing, low-to-mid energy, resonant timbre and girly chatter. Ideal for documentary narration and long-form audio.
In colour: the 7 parts that make this style.
The one direction where British tolerates a high energy value, because the register is already informal. Keep the resonance bright or it reads as forced cheerfulness.
A British female voice, 20 to 30: bright and enthusiastic, with high pitch, fast pacing, high energy, bright sparkling resonance and girly chatter. Ideal for social video, lifestyle brands and app onboarding.
In colour: the 4 parts that make this style.
What makes Standard British
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- Non-rhotic
- Post-vocalic /r/ is not pronounced: car is [kɑː], water is [ˈwɔːtə]. This is the single feature that most reliably separates a British read from an American one, and it is why asking for warmth with an American reference can pull the accent back across the Atlantic mid-sentence.
- TRAP–BATH split
- bath, dance, chance and after take the long /ɑː/ rather than the /æ/ of General American. Scripts heavy in these words expose the accent quickly, which makes them useful for auditioning a candidate.
- No father–bother merger
- LOT stays a rounded short /ɒ/, distinct from PALM. American English merges these; the distinction is a strong tell in words like not, top and body.
- Narrower pitch range
- Standard British delivery uses a flatter intonation contour than General American, with less terminal rise on declaratives. This is why a high energy value reads as theatrical in British far sooner than it does in American.
- Yod retention and coalescence
- tune and duty keep a /j/ glide, and in contemporary speech coalesce to [tʃuːn] and [ˈdʒuːti]. Requesting an older or more formal register suppresses the coalescence; asking for a contemporary read invites it.
- What searchers usually mean
- "British" in a search almost never means regional. It means Received Pronunciation or contemporary Estuary: southern England, broadly educated, non-regional. For Cockney, Scouse or Geordie the mapped labels are London and Northern English.
31 Standard British 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.
- Amanda
Young Adult · Female
A joyful and hip British young adult voice that brings energy to podcasts and modern content.
0:00ZZb4X9ueHSdRlv9q - Courtney
Adult · Female
A joyful high-pitched British adult voice perfect for sales and professional announcements.
0:00UX3Hi2ZmK7tT0c3G - Elodie-Rose
Young Adult · Female
A young British voice with sharp, enthusiastic energy and crisp articulation, sparky and to the point for customer support and care.
0:00y9bQqIDnyxwqK01t
Another 27 Standard British 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 | British |
| Gender | female |
| Age range | 20 to 30 |
| Character | glossy and confident |
| Pitch | high pitch |
| Pace | fast pacing |
| Energy | high energy |
| Resonance / timbre | bright sparkling resonance |
| Modifiers | girly chatter |
| Applications | a friendly receptionist or assistant |
4 failure modes we hit repeatedly, and what fixes each one.
- "British" on its own drifts towards a dated, theatrical Received Pronunciation, the accent of a 1950s newsreel rather than a person you would hear today.
- Add a register word. "Contemporary British" or "Estuary" pulls the read into the present without naming a region the rewriter does not map.
- High energy reads as theatrical in British far sooner than it does in American, because Standard British uses a narrower intonation contour. An energy value that sounds animated in General American sounds like a stage performance here.
- Drop energy by one or two steps when you port an American prompt to British. Freya carries high energy deliberately, because she is a receptionist persona rather than a narrator.
- Anchoring the prompt to an American reference, such as "like a US radio host, but British", pulls rhoticity back in, and the /r/ reappears part-way through a sentence.
- Keep every reference inside the target accent. Describe the quality you want ("resonant", "broadcast-warm") rather than naming a voice from another accent.
- Asking for Cockney, Scouse, Geordie, Brummie or Yorkshire produces an unreliable approximation, because those labels are not in the mapped set.
- Use the mapped label that covers the region: London for Cockney and Estuary, Northern English for Scouse, Geordie and Yorkshire.
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. A prompt that produces a warm British voice will not produce the equivalent warmth if you translate it into French. The brief has to be rewritten for the locale, not translated. Read each descriptor against its own language.
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 British female voice, 20 to 30, glossy and confident, with girly chatter, high pitch, fast pacing, high energy and bright sparkling resonance. Ideal for a friendly receptionist or assistant." That is the exact prompt that produced Freya, a voice in the library today.
In practice yes. Searches for a British voice almost never mean a regional accent. They mean RP or contemporary Estuary: southern England, non-regional, broadly educated. If you want a specific region, the mapped labels are London and Northern English.
Not as named accents. The rewriter maps London and Northern English, which cover those regions. Asking directly for Cockney or Geordie yields an approximation we would not stand behind, so we would rather point you at the label that works.
Both work. British voices are ready to use with no design step at all. 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 Standard British
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.