▲ | moron4hire 12 hours ago | |||||||
I've noticed the same thing with voice assistants and constructed languages. I always set voice assistants to a British accent. It gives enough of a "not from around here" change to the voice that it sounds much more believable to me. I'm sure it's not as believable to an actual British person. But it works for me. As for conlangs: many years ago, I worked on a game where one of the goals was to have the NPCs dynamically generate dialog. I spent quite a bit of time trying to generate realistic English and despared that it was just never very believable (I was young, I didn't have a good understanding of what was and wasn't possible). At some point, I don't remember exactly why, I switched to having the NPCs speak a fictional language. It became a puzzle in the game to have to learn this language. But once you did (and it wasn't hard, they couldn't say very many things), it made the characters feel much more believable. Obviously, the whole run-around was just an avoidance of the Uncanny Valley, where the effort of translation distracted you from the fact that it was all constructed. Though now I'm wondering if enough exposure to the game and its language would eventually make you very fluent in it and you would then start noticing it was a construct. | ||||||||
▲ | ben_w 11 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||
> I'm sure it's not as believable to an actual British person. FWIW: As a British person, most of TTS British voices I've tested sound like an American trying to put on something approximating one specific regional accent only to then accidentally drift between the accents of several other regions. | ||||||||
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