European Portuguese text to speech with six voices from Portugal

What a listener in Portugal hears

European and Brazilian Portuguese are one language on paper and two in the ear. Portugal reduces its unstressed vowels until some of them vanish, so a word like telefone loses most of its e sounds and the rhythm becomes clipped and consonant-heavy. An s at the end of a syllable is a sh: os livros comes out as ush livrush. The d and t of de and te stay hard, where most of Brazil softens them to dji and tchi, and the l at the end of Portugal is dark, where Brazil turns it into a w.

Many text-to-speech tools treat Portuguese as Brazilian by default, because Brazil is where most Portuguese speakers are. That leaves a gap exactly where the accent matters: a phone menu for a company in Porto, a course for staff in Lisbon, an ad on Portuguese radio, a public-service message. A Brazilian voice is understood everywhere in Portugal and still sounds Brazilian, the way an American voice sounds American in London. Maria is friendly, calm and clear, for storytelling, audiobooks and podcasts. Mariza is a young voice, clear and calm. Beatriz is calm and articulate with a soft Lisbon accent, for narration and brand content. Patricio is warm and friendly and Tiago young and calm, both from the north of Portugal. João is calm and professional, for news, documentaries and audiobooks.

It is a smaller set than the Brazilian one, so play the samples before choosing. The accents are mainland: there are no voices from Madeira or the Azores, and none from Angola or Mozambique, where Portuguese follows the European standard in writing and has a sound of its own. For Brazil, the nine Brazilian voices on the Portuguese page are the right ones.

Write it the way Portugal writes it

A voice reads the words on the page, and the two standards choose different ones. In Portugal a mobile phone is a telemóvel, a bus an autocarro, a train a comboio, breakfast the pequeno-almoço, a screen an ecrã and a file a ficheiro; Brazil says celular, ônibus, trem, café da manhã, tela and arquivo. Portugal says estou a fazer where Brazil says estou fazendo, and uses tu with its own verb forms where Brazil uses você. A script written for Brazil and voiced by a speaker from Portugal sounds like a Brazilian text read with a European accent, so localise the copy first and voice it second.