What dialect of Irish are the speech studio text to speech models (Colm and Orla) modeled after?

Question

What dialect of Irish are the speech studio text to speech models (Colm and Orla) modeled after?

Sean McGoff 0

I am interested in learning more about Speech Studio's text to speech models for the Irish language. Currently, there are two available voices on the platform (Colm and Orla) which are labelled under Irish (Ireland). The Irish language does not have an official pronunciation, so I am curious to know if there is a specific dialect the TTS model was trained on, or if it was a mix of dialects?

Thank you.

SRILAKSHMI C 18,035 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-05-05T17:58:33.65+00:00
Hello Sean McGoff,

Thank you for your question regarding the Irish text-to-speech voices in Speech Studio.

Dialect information for Colm and Orla

The voices Colm (ga-IE-ColmNeural) and Orla (ga-IE-OrlaNeural) available in Azure AI Speech are currently offered under the Irish (Ireland) locale.

At this time Microsoft does not publicly specify a single regional dialect (such as Munster, Connacht, or Ulster) for these voices.

Instead, these voices are designed using a neutral Irish accent, intended to be:

Broadly understandable across Irish-speaking regions

Suitable for general-purpose applications

This typically means the pronunciation is standardized and may incorporate elements from multiple dialects, rather than being tied to one specific regional variety.

Currently, there is no public documentation that provides:

Dialect-specific training details

Regional sourcing of voice data

Phonetic or linguistic breakdown of the models

Only high-level information (language and voice names) is available in official documentation.

If you’re looking for deeper details on exactly which dialectal features or regional recordings went into the training set, could you help me out by answering:

Are you trying to match the TTS output to a particular region’s pronunciation (for example, Munster vs. Connacht)?

Do you need phonetic or phonological details for linguistic research or localization?

Would you like to know more about the original data sources (speaker profiles, recording locations, etc.)?

Is your end goal comparing Colm/Orla to other Irish-dialect models, or building a custom voice with a single dialect?

Please refer this

• Language and voice support for Azure Speech – voices by locale https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/ai-services/speech-service/language-support?wt.mc_id=knowledgesearch_inproduct_azure-cxp-community-insider#voices-by-locale

I Hope this helps. Do let me know if you have any further queries.

Thank you!
SRILAKSHMI C 18,035 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-05-06T10:30:22.9066667+00:00

Hi @Sean McGoff

Did you get any chance to review the above response. Do let me know if you have any further queries.

Thank you!