If you have a moment, get over to CereProc. They do speech synthesis, and you can try out their voices: British, American, and Scottish. You can even buy them if you’re keen — they work on Mac and Windows.

I’m having a play now. I’m rather fond of Kirsty, whose Scottish accent is a little more broad. The accents are good on numbers: try “twenty thirty forty fifty”. Not so good on disambiguating various senses of words, as in “I knew that that was the right answer.” But great on Belle and Sebastian lyrics, e.g. “I was allergic to so much dairy.”

Now when can we expect the Australian accent?