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IMHO one of the reasons for the author's surprise is the colloquial use of the word accent, whereby one usually means a mix of pronunciation [1] and intonation

IMHO one of the reasons for the author's surprise is the colloquial use of the word accent, whereby one usually means a mix of pronunciation [1] and intonation [2]. I think that the surprise disappears once we look at these two factors individually. As per jefftk's comment, it is to be expected that TTS in a certain language will be limited to the phones (and thus the pronunciation) of its language. On the other hand, intonation is always bound to sound "foreign" seeing as this TTS software cannot get even the original intonation right (try listening to the sample text with the US voice to see what I mean), let alone that of a different language. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)

jrochkind1 5y ago
The surprising thing to some of us is how much it sounds like a human native speaker of that language speaking English. Not that it doesn't sound like 'native' English intonation, nobody would expect that, but still surprising to see how after being trained to speak language A, it sounds like a human language A speaker's accent when reading English too, even though that wasn't the training intent/setup. Perhaps not surprising to you that it would go like this because you understand the technology better so expected it! And then there are other people in this thread who disagree and don't think most of them sound very much like a human speaker of non-English language speaking English! So maybe it's not obvious after all...