You can design a West African English AI voice with one prompt
Describe the accent, gender, age and delivery in one sentence and Gradium returns a West African English voice id you call from the API or the SDK. Every West African English voice is built to order, so the age, gender and delivery are yours to specify rather than picked from a shelf.
Nigerian English, Ghanaian English, Naija accent, African English and west african english all describe the same voice. Write it as West African English in your prompt.
Hear it
- West African English0:00
“Honestly, I had not thought about it that way, but now that you mention it, that would explain rather a lot.”
The prompt
that produced it
A Nigerian man in his late thirties from Lagos, warm and confident, unhurried, with a clear Nigerian English accent.
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
West African English
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 Syllable-timed rhythm: it is the feature a mid-range read is most likely to soften, and the one a listener places West African English by.
A West African 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 West African English it usually costs syllable-timed rhythm.
A West African 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 vowels, which a support brief tends to flatten.
A West African 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 West African English is no exception: push it and listen for whether syllable-timed rhythm survives.
A West African 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 West African English
sound like itself
Each feature below is something the prompt has to encode, or something a careless prompt will accidentally undo.
- Syllable-timed rhythm
- Syllables carry near-equal weight rather than alternating stressed and unstressed, which flattens the rhythmic contrast that British and American English rely on. The result is unusually clear at speed, which suits instructional and announcement work.
- Monophthongal vowels
- Diphthongs reduce to single steady vowels, so face leans towards fes and goat towards got. Requesting a smooth or gliding delivery works against this and blurs the accent.
- Rhotic, with a tapped R
- Post-vocalic r is pronounced and often tapped rather than approximated. This puts the accent closer to Scottish than to Standard British in that one respect.
- Full, resonant delivery
- West African English tends towards a forward, resonant production with strong projection as the default. A high energy value therefore reads as natural here rather than theatrical, unlike in Standard British.
Design your own custom West African English voice
for your use case
Voice Design generates West African English 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 | West African 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 reduced delivery works against the full monophthongal vowels and the even syllable weight.
- Ask for clarity and projection, which are what the accent does naturally, and shorten the script if you need less time.
- Requesting a quiet or intimate read fights the forward resonant default and can make the voice sound withheld.
- Use a lower energy value rather than asking for intimacy, and keep the resonance as it is.
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 West African 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 West African 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.
Syllable-timed rhythm above all: Syllables carry near-equal weight rather than alternating stressed and unstressed, which flattens the rhythmic contrast that British and American English rely on. The result is unusually clear at speed, which suits instructional and announcement work.
Describe it and Voice Design builds it. Voice Design generates West African English 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. West African 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 West African English
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 West African English, the feature that decides it is usually Syllable-timed rhythm.
Paste the prompt, change the parts that matter to you, and generate. No recording, no casting, no licensing.