Microsoft has announced that it’s adding regional accents in its Microsoft Translator app on iOS and Android so that you can hear text-to-speech playback in an accent that’s more familiar to you. As an example, users listening to English being played back can hear it in American, British, Australian or other English accents.
The new regional accents are officially called Speech Regions by Microsoft and are available for a selection of languages, not just English. Spanish, another language that is widespread around the world, also has regional variants and now these are reflected in Microsoft Translator too. Microsoft says this new feature is great for people travelling to new areas or trying to learn words and phrases in the regional accent you’re most interested in.
To access the new Speech Regions, select a language such as Spanish then select ‘Speech Region’. From here, you can choose a region and choose from a selection of voices that reflect that accent.
In addition to Speech Regions, Microsoft has also updated the language picker interface making it easier to see which languages are available and each feature they support in the app. Some of the features that are available in the app include text translation, speech translation, speech auto language detection, image translation, offline translations, and text-to-speech.
Microsoft says the new app update is available for Microsoft Translator on both Android and iOS.
3 Comments - Add comment