Narration voice samples
All 11 voices reading the same paragraph, made by the converter exactly as it would make your book. Nothing here was touched up afterwards.
The passage
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813. Public domain.
American
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Clear — American female 17 s Default
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Amy — American female 21 s
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Kristin — American female 20 s
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Ryan — American male 16 s
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Joe — American male 17 s
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Clear — American male male 17 s
British
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Jenny — British female 19 s
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Cori — British female 19 s
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Alan — British male 22 s
Northern English
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Northern English male 17 s
Scottish
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Alba — Scottish female 19 s
What you're hearing
Every voice is a Piper model, an open-source neural text-to-speech system, running in your browser. They're the “medium” quality tier, about 63 MB each, which is the largest that's sensible to download before a conversion starts.
Two gaps, stated rather than hidden. Piper publishes no Australian English voice at all, so there isn’t one here. And Alba is its only Scottish voice, so there’s no Scottish male.
How to choose
Twenty seconds tells you whether you like a voice. It doesn’t tell you whether you can listen to it for eleven hours, and those turn out to be different questions. Pick two you like, convert a short book with each, and keep the one you don’t notice.
Speed is better changed in your player than here. Every audiobook app has a speed control, and setting it there means you can change your mind without converting again. The guide to choosing a voice covers pacing, names and what synthetic narration still does badly.
When you’ve picked one, open the converter and choose it from the voice list. The preview button there plays a short line in each voice too.