Bulgarian text to speech with native voices

Why a native Bulgarian voice matters

Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic, and the letters are the easy part. The hard part is stress: it can fall on any syllable, moves between forms of the same word, and is never marked in ordinary text. вълна́ is a wave and въ́лна is wool; пара́ is a coin and па́ра is steam. A voice has to know the word to put the stress in the right place, and a foreign voice guesses. The unstressed vowels then shift the way a Bulgarian says them: an unstressed а drifts towards ъ and an unstressed о towards у, so the stress decides how the whole word sounds, not only where its beat falls.

Two letters give a non-native voice away at once. ъ is a schwa-like vowel with no English letter - the first vowel of България - and щ is sht, not the long, soft sh of Russian, which is exactly what a voice trained on Russian says instead. The definite article is a suffix, so градът, книгата and селото carry it inside the word. All eight voices are Bulgarian speakers, most of them from Sofia. Milena is a balanced, clear voice and the most used Bulgarian voice in the library, steady for news and persuasive for ads; Elena is expressive with a deeper tone for podcasts; Alexandra bright and enthusiastic for advertising; Elizabeth a calm, warm narrator. Peter is a warm, slightly husky voice for educational video, Georgi soft and steady for audiobooks and podcasts, Yordan a clear presenter for e-learning, Kosta relaxed and conversational.