Language and voice support for the Speech service

The table in this section summarizes the locales supported for speech to text. For details, see the table footnotes.

More remarks for speech to text locales are included in the custom speech section of this article.

¹ The model is bilingual and also supports English.

Custom speech

To improve Speech to text recognition accuracy, customization is available for some languages and base models. Depending on the locale, you can upload audio + human-labeled transcripts, plain text, and pronunciation data. By default, plain text customization is supported for all available base models. To learn more about customization, see custom speech.

These are the locales that support the display text format feature: da-DK, de-DE, en-AU, en-CA, en-GB, en-HK, en-IE, en-IN, en-NG, en-NZ, en-PH, en-SG, en-US, es-ES, es-MX, fi-FI, fr-CA, fr-FR, hi-IN, it-IT, ja-JP, ko-KR, nb-NO, nl-NL, pl-PL, pt-BR, pt-PT, sv-SE, tr-TR, zh-cn, zh-HK.

The table in this section summarizes the locales and voices supported for text to speech. For details, see the table footnotes.

More remarks for text to speech locales are included in the voice styles and roles, and prebuilt neural voices sections in this article.

¹ The neural voice is not available in Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet.

² The neural voice is not available in Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet.

³ Phonemes, custom lexicon, and visemes aren't supported. For details about supported visemes, see viseme locales.

⁴ The neural voice is a multilingual voice in Azure AI Speech. Turbo version of Azure OpenAI voices has the similar voice persona as Azure OpenAI voices but supports extra features. Turbo voices support the full set of SSML elements and more features like word boundary, just like other Azure AI Speech voices.

⁵ The OpenAI text to speech voices in Azure AI Speech aren't supported in Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet.

Multilingual voices

Multilingual voices can support more languages. This expansion enhances your ability to express content in various languages, to overcome language barriers and foster a more inclusive global communication environment.

Use this table to understand all supported speaking languages for each multilingual neural voice. If the voice doesn’t speak the language of the input text, the Speech service doesn’t output synthesized audio. The table is sorted by the number of supported languages in descending order. The primary locale for each voice is indicated by the prefix in its name, such as the voice en-US-AndrewMultilingualNeural, its primary locale is en-US.

¹ The neural voice is not available in Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet .

² The neural voice is a multilingual voice in Azure AI Speech. All multilingual voices can speak in the auto-detected language of the input text in the default locale without using SSML. However, you can still use the <lang xml:lang> element to adjust the speaking accent of each language to set preferred accent such as British accent (en-GB) for English.

Voice styles and roles

In some cases, you can adjust the speaking style to express different emotions like cheerfulness, empathy, and calm. All prebuilt voices with speaking styles support style degree adjustment. You can optimize the voice for different scenarios like customer service, newscast, and voice assistant. With roles, the same voice can act as a different age and gender.

To learn how you can configure and adjust neural voice styles and roles, see Speech Synthesis Markup Language.

Use the following table to determine supported styles and roles for each neural voice.

¹ The neural voice is not available in Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet..

² The advertisement-upbeat style for this voice is not available in Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet.

³ The sports-commentary style for this voice is not available in Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet.

⁴ The sports-commentary-excited style for this voice is not available in Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet.

Viseme

This table lists all the locales supported for Viseme. For more information about Viseme, see Get facial position with viseme and Viseme element.

Prebuilt neural voices

Each prebuilt neural voice supports a specific language and dialect, identified by locale. You can try the demo and hear the voices in the Voice Gallery.

Each prebuilt neural voice model is available at 24kHz and high-fidelity 48kHz. Other sample rates can be obtained through upsampling or downsampling when synthesizing.

Note that the following neural voices are retired.

• The English (United Kingdom) voice en-GB-MiaNeural is retired on October 30, 2021. All service requests to en-GB-MiaNeural will be redirected to en-GB-SoniaNeural automatically as of October 30, 2021.
• The en-US-JessaNeural voice is retired and replaced by en-US-AriaNeural. If you were using "Jessa" before, convert to "Aria."
• The Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified) voice zh-cn-XiaoxuanNeural is retired on February 29, 2024. All service requests to zh-cn-XiaoxuanNeural will be redirected to zh-cn-XiaoyiNeural automatically as of February 29, 2024.

The table in this section summarizes the 33 locales supported for pronunciation assessment, and each language is available on all speech to text regions. Latest update extends support from English to 32 more languages and quality enhancements to existing features, including accuracy, fluency and miscue assessment. You should specify the language that you're learning or practicing improving pronunciation. The default language is set as en-US. If you know your target learning language, set the locale accordingly. For example, if you're learning British English, you should specify the language as en-GB. If you're teaching a broader language, such as Spanish, and are uncertain about which locale to select, you can run various accent models (es-ES, es-MX) to determine the one that achieves the highest score to suit your specific scenario. If you're interested in languages not listed in the following table, fill out this intake form for further assistance.

Real-time speech translation

The table in this section summarizes the locales supported for Speech translation. Speech translation supports different languages for speech to speech and speech to text translation. The available target languages depend on whether the translation target is speech or text.

Translate from language

To set the input speech recognition language, specify the full locale with a dash (-) separator. See the speech to text language table. All languages are supported except jv-ID and wuu-CN. The default language is en-US if you don't specify a language.

Translate to text language

To set the translation target language, with few exceptions you only specify the language code that precedes the locale dash (-) separator. For example, use es for Spanish (Spain) instead of es-ES. See the speech translation target language table below. The default language is en if you don't specify a language.

The table in this section summarizes the locales supported for Language identification.

The table in this section summarizes the locales supported for the Intent Recognizer Pattern Matcher.