Hahaha yeah, I’m a kiwi living in Melbourne and at first before Apple had added New Zealand to Siri’s input localisation I had it set to Australian and it’d get everything wrong, I found that instead setting it to British English it worked a lot better and then better again when New Zealand was added, regardless I keep Siri’s voice set to British Female as it sounds the most natural to me.

For those that aren’t familiar with Australian vs New Zealand ascents - they’re /very/ different despite how close the countries are physically located to each other. When spoken New Zealand English has more of a British / South African - ‘rounder’ sound, where Australian is generally (especially as you move north or west up the country) more nasal and closer to American English with more emphasis on E rather than O if that makes sense.

You just answered a question I pondered earlier today as I watched the MacOS X demo I linked to above somewhere. And that is to the question if a native speaker would recognize the synthetic speech as unnatural. As the video progresses it lands on international languages such as Arabic and Chinese among other things. To my ear and my best memory of how those languages sound the synthetic versions came out pretty convincing. It made me think about a concept I've had about a test to language recognition: if a native speaker were to speak gibberish in their native tongue would an outsider to the language recognize it as gibberish or assume it was vocabulary in that language.