French text-to-speech on product pages: what gets read right, and what doesn't
Selling in France, Belgium or Quebec and adding audio to your product pages? Product copy is the hardest French text a voice can face: prices, per-kilo rates, dimensions, review scores, barcodes. Here is the exact output of our French text preparation on typical product lines, including the three cases it still gets wrong.
If you run an online store in English, you probably never think about how "$49.99" is spoken. Voices have heard it millions of times. Open a French storefront and the same voice faces "49,99 €", "12,90 €/kg", "140 x 190", "4,5/5" and "Pack x3", in a language where the decimal mark is a comma, the currency symbol comes after the number, and a slash can mean "per", "out of", "and" or a fraction depending on what follows.
For teams expanding into French-speaking markets, and for anyone affected by the European Accessibility Act's e-commerce rules, this matters. An audio product page only helps if what the listener hears is correct.
Why product copy is a stress test
Product pages are dense with numbers in shorthand that humans decode from habit. A French shopper reads "9,99 €/mois" as "per month", "4/5" next to a star rating as "four out of five", and "4/5 des clients" as "four fifths of customers". The characters are identical; the reading is not.
A neural voice left alone with these forms guesses, and its guesses lean towards whatever it heard most in training, which is often English conventions. That is why we do not hand raw numbers to the voice. A French-specific text preparation step turns them into words first, and only then does synthesis start. It is the core of our approach to French text-to-speech, and it is the part you can actually check.
The exact output, line by line
Here are typical product page lines run through that preparation as it works today. The right-hand column is the literal output, copied, not paraphrased. A rough English gloss follows each one for readers who do not speak French.
| On the page | What the voice receives | Meaning |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Prix : 49,99 € au lieu de 69,99 €, soit -30 % | Prix : quarante-neuf euros quatre-vingt-dix-neuf au lieu de soixante-neuf euros quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, soit moins trente pour cent | 49 euros 99, was 69 euros 99, 30% off |
| 0,99 € la pièce | quatre-vingt-dix-neuf centimes la pièce | 99 cents each |
| 12,90 €/kg | douze euros quatre-vingt-dix le kilo | 12 euros 90 per kilo |
| Abonnement 9,99 €/mois | Abonnement neuf euros quatre-vingt-dix-neuf par mois | 9 euros 99 per month |
| Pack x3 | Pack de trois | pack of three |
| 140 x 190 cm | cent quarante sur cent quatre-vingt-dix centimètres | 140 by 190 centimetres |
| Note 4,5/5 (120 avis) | Note quatre virgule cinq sur cinq (cent vingt avis) | rated 4.5 out of 5 |
| ★★★★☆ | quatre étoiles sur cinq | four stars out of five |
| EAN 3760123456789 | EAN trois sept six zéro un deux trois quatre cinq six sept huit neuf | read digit by digit |
Three design choices sit behind those lines. Prices are spoken the way a French cashier would say them, "forty-nine euros ninety-nine", never "forty-nine point nine nine euros". Barcodes are read digit by digit, because nobody needs to hear a thirteen-digit number as trillions. And "4/5" becomes "out of five" only next to a review word: in front of "des sondés" (of respondents), the same characters correctly become "four fifths". That counter-case is tested alongside the rule, because a rule that breaks correct text is worse than no rule at all.
The building blocks are covered separately in our posts on currencies and amounts and units of measurement. A product page is simply where all of them collide.
Where it still slips
The same test turns up forms worth knowing about before you narrate a whole catalogue:
- Days abbreviated as "j". "Retours sous 30 j" (returns within 30 days) comes out as "trente j". The preparation does not yet expand a standalone "j". Writing "30 jours" fixes it and reads better on screen anyway.
- Regional size labels. "Taille 38 FR" is read "trente-huit effe erre": the abbreviation is spelled out, which is technically correct and sounds nothing like a shop assistant. One pronunciation entry fixes it across the whole catalogue.
- Alphanumeric codes. A reference like "AB-1234" or a promo code like "NOEL25" is left untouched, so the voice decides how to read it, and it is not always consistent with a code it has never seen. If the listener needs to remember a code, spell it out through the lexicon.
For completeness: "1,5 L" becomes "un virgule cinq litre", singular. That is the recommended French rule (plural starts at two), even if some ears expect "litres".
Fixing it without touching your copy
Product copy usually comes from a catalogue feed, and nobody wants to rewrite it for audio. The pronunciation lexicon sets once how "FR", a product line name or an in-house reference should be spoken, and the displayed text keeps no trace of it.
Before switching audio on for five hundred products, try three: one heavy on prices, one on dimensions, one on reviews, and listen to each to the end. If you are on Shopify, the setup guide gets you there in minutes. Those three listens will tell you more than any demo about whether a tool reads your catalogue or merely guesses at it.
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