I’ve just purchased Synthesizer V and initially I am very impressed with what it can do but most importantly its huge potential. Just wondering if new databases of voices are being produced and will be released from time to time? I’m particularly interested using British / English sounding voices. I appreciate you can edit the existing voices to make them sound more British but this seems like a lot of work! I’d happily wait and buy new ones if they are being released.
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There are multiple voice databases in development, but none of them are publicly known to have a British accent.
See the “Current Developments” section here:
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The subject of an ‘English’ accent has cropped up before and the implication of there being a single accent to achieve this confuses me. I don’t mean to trash the idea but wonder what is expected here, I live in Lincolnshire (about half way up the East coast of England) and if I travel 20 miles North the accent is radically different, if I travel to the West coast, a 2 hour drive) I struggle to understand their accent - but it is still English - and will have driven through a couple of other regional accent areas. I suspect in both cases there would be phonemes required that would not be required for my local accent.
If the subject matter is further confused with the idea of a ‘British’ accent, does that then cover Welsh, Scottish, Irish (Gaelic)?
Maybe the best you could hope for would be a generic ‘English’ accent where the American twang (no offence intended to those across the Pond) is calmed down?
A generic English accent is what I mean. The singing equivalent of RP. A neutral, non regional kind of thing. But why not Welsh, Scottish and Irish too?!
From an international perspective, “British accent” often refers to a generic England accent. Basically a mishmash of accents you’d hear in TV shows or movies like Doctor Who, James Bond, or Harry Potter. If people mean Scottish/Irish/Welsh they typically use those more specific words to describe it.
It may not be an accurate way to refer to things, but that’s at least the common usage based on my experience in Canada.
Though I think as far as the people interested in SynthV voice databases go, they largely just want more options that are not American English.
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Yes I totally agree. I think options other than American English would be essential for this software to have more universal appeal.
Well, I both agree and disagree.
In order to grow, first they need to reach the bigger possible market, and the American market is way bigger than the british one. Also, non-native English speakers are exposed to way more American sounding audiovisual products than British products.
So I think for Dreamtonics and their associated companies, at this stage of development, where there are very few native English voices and a lot of ground not covered by the existing ones, it makes more sense to focus on filling the gaps with American/neutral English voices.
I do agree however that more of everything would be great, including British accent but not only, and other languages too… for example Spanish is the most native speaked language in the world, and music in Spanish has the second largest impact worldwide (mostly by latin-american artists)…
But I understand this technology is not so well known by big public and market might be limited for those orher accents/languages right now. They will come in the future, but by now I would prioritize on new VB that could help cover more ground stylistically and grab a larger market into this technology.
Voices that could do Soul, Metal, Bel Canto, Gospel… that is what I would focus, and accents for later on.
Yeah - The quintessential “British Accent” is indeed a vexed issue (depends who you talk to 
)
Regional TV stations typically employ local people as announcers . . . .
The “old” view was that the “British Accent” was “BBC English” as portrayed by the News Readers .
I would suggest that this is possibly not suitable for a “Singing” Voice?
How to “Homogenise” it to a sensible degree would be what Dreamtonics have to decide?
NOT an easy task - again, it depend WHO you ask 
This difficult “choice” IMO opinion is what may well s l o w the appearance of “British English”
in the product?
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Given how vocal synthesis is still a pretty narrow niche in the English-speaking world I expect the exact accents we end up with are largely up to chance – it’s probably just a matter of which vocalists are interested in being voice providers for this sort of technology, and whether that interest comes at the right time to make it a reality.
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FWIW the accents in North America differ as much as in Britain - the referred “twang” is a stereotype of a US Southern “country” accent, but Canada’s east coast, west coast are as different as it can be from US states to general regions and that’s not even counting Central Americas and South Americas.
Part of it might be improved with different voice providers who actually have the British pronunciations inbuilt. Some might be achievable via alternate spellings/phonemes. I have run into issues trying to use alternate spellings without good results - it sometimes turns out badly if one isn’t typing a known word spelled correctly.
FWIW, the rest of the world’s pop music (where the majority of work would be performed) tends to use global mainstream languages (English, French, Spanish whoever their European invaders originally were) or their local languages. So I would suggest that perhaps Dreamtonics could develop and sell a functional, relatively easy-to-use Developer’;s Kit with a real front end GUI for the novice that would allow local, national or just unique languages to generate their OWN, useful only on machines they license, with DT’s permission. Then develop a marketable product if there is enough intersst, but meanwhile, Tagalog, Hindi, Ubuntu, Xhosa? all the wonderful tongues that are not yet available - could be…
maybe the English accent of The Beatles? no wait, they sang American
frankly, when i watch UK programming, i have to have the closed captioning on or it’s virtually impossible to understand what is said in about 80% of the shows… innit?
seriously though. there could a market for somehow overlaying “accents” on the voice. not sure if this is something that can be done with the alternate voicing they do for non-voice actor dubs, but some of the newer programmed translators like when Netflix wants to have 50 languages supported and only 6 of them have actual voice actors… and the variations (like French) seem to have some accenting / dialect tweaks added for SEA, and Africa variants.
The Beatles didn’t sing in American accents!
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In British pop of the 60’s the accent was often referred to as mid-Atlantic, i.e. somewhere between British and American vowels. But some songs are written for regional accents and need them to work, think of the Cockney songs of a bygone age, or Chas and Dave.
Then think of Sade: a beautiful smooth singing voice, but her speaking voice is out and out East London.
Having had some singing tuition (although not a good singer myself), I don’t think my coach was trying to give me a particular accent, she was trying to give me a full tone that was clear and understandable.
But as others have said, the current voices do tend towards American. There’s a way to go yet.
p.s. I am also from Lincolnshire originally, but have been in Suffolk long enough for my own accent to drift somewhere between.
I think the accents are just a reflection of the Voice Bank provider.
Eclipsed Sounds are based in the US, so their VBs will reflect that. All the other companies that make voices seem to be based in Asia and the VBs I tried have Asian accents.
Dreamtonics is based in Japan, but for the English native VBs they used English native singers that live in Japan (at least NineZero -think he is Australian- and Ritchy -think he is French/Camerooan-).
haha