Voices from the South: Study and Synthesis of Andalusian Accents with Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The Andalusian accent is a key element of the regions cultural heritage and a topic of significant interest for linguists, especially regarding language variation and linguistic typology. This paper introduces “Voices from the South”, a project which aims to develop advanced text-to-speech (TTS) voices in a variety of Andalusian accents. The tool is intended to enhance the reading of texts in local accents and assist speech-impaired individuals by preserving their personal Andalusian accent. Additionally, this project can serve as a foundation for similar developments in other varieties of Spanish, with all tools and data made freely available online at the end of the project. The linguistic characteristics for each accent to be synthesised will come from the findings of “Atlas Lingüístico Interactivo de los Acentos de Andalucía”, an ongoing project which aims to map accent variation across 500 data points in Andalusia and which is due to be completed in December 2026.