Do you want to explore the wonders of the Basque language? Check this free AI voice generator.
At the western border of the Pyrenees, the Basque language, or Euskara, is spoken in Spain and France. On the Spanish side of the border, Euskara is spoken in Alava, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, and Navarre. The provinces of Labourd, Lower Navarre, and Soule locate in the Northern Basque area (Le Pays Basque) on the French side of the border. These seven areas or provinces are known as Euskal Herria. According to the most recent statistics, 900,000 out of three million people speak Basque.
But Basque uniqueness uncovers a mystery: It has no recognised origin or relationship to any other language, which has perplexed linguists for decades. Euskera is Europe’s oldest living language. It is a very ancient language with uncertain roots. To be specific, Basque is not an Indo-European language or linked to any other currently spoken languages. It is classified as an isolated language since it has no origins in Latin, other Romance languages, or even Germanic languages. Romance languages have impacted the Basque dialect in terms of parts of its vocabulary over time –the reason why it counts with a significant degree of dialectal diversity– but its structure and grammar remain distinct.
Would this explain why text to speech (TTS) tools –those assets that simulate human discourse from a text and then read it aloud for us– don’t incorporate Euskera in them? Do these gadgets consider this enigmatic tongue too weird or not relevant enough? Well, we disagree. So we signed up for a quest in search of a TTS software with Basque voices. Here’s what we found:
Woord
Woord is a multilingual AI voice generator that produces realistic voices in high-quality across 28 mother tongues, including some of their regional variations. Let’s take, for example, American, British, Australian and Indian English, Mexican and Catalan Spanish, Brazillian Portuguese, Canadian French and Hindi and Bengali Indian. In total, the platform offers 50 different male, female and gender-neutral speakers.
What’s more, you can further customise your spokespeople to make them sound more natural. Woord comes with an SSML editor, a real-deal tool regarding speech synthesis. It can emphasise or whisper parts of your speech to give it the right tone, add breaths and breaks to firmly mark the start and end of an idea, arrange phonemes and pronunciations, etc. Moreover, advanced audio settings allow you to speed up or slow down the mouthpiece and select the ideal device profile (e.g. IVR, GPS and Smarthome, among others) for your vocals.
Furthermore, Woord counts with other cool features: OCR technology to read scans and images, an MP3 download button to save and redistribute outputs and a Chrome extension to incorporate TTS onto your devices. We could mention more, but every single state-of-the-art functionalities are available for free. When you create an account and sign up, the platform gives you 20,000 characters and two audios to enjoy these usages at will.
Isn’t that reason enough to try its Basque and other voices? Let us know in the comments!