TTS - pronounciation of words in foreign language

Question

I am using de-DE-ConradNeural and de-DE-KatjaNeural to synthesize german text. They seem to be able to recognize some english words and pronounce them properly in English - but not all.

Using SSML tags <lang xml:lang='en-US'>xxx</lang> it seems to be possible to force Conrad and Katja to pronounce the terms in English. But this "trick" does not seem to work at all when using it with french or italian words - Conrad and Katja will ignore <lang xml:lang='fr-FR'> or <lang xml:lang='it-IT'>and read the foreign words as if they were in german.
Is this behaviour correct and is there any workaround, other than spelling the words in IPA-phonetics, which is very clumsy to handle.

Answer 1

@Oxueillirep I think you are using the right tag to include a foreign language in your XML as this scenario is available as adjust speaking languages in the service. But, the only voice that seems to support seems to be en-US-JennyMultilingualNeural as per documentation.

Infact, you could simply try using JennyMultilingualNeural and check if this works for you because it supports 13 secondary languages. Please check this blog for more details. You could also build your own custom voice with multi-lingual, multi-speaker & universal model with custom neural voice by submitting the intake form.

Hope this helps.