[BUG] Read Aloud: poor German voice quality overall, and the male voice reads German with an English accent (Windows)

Summary

In the official Claude Code desktop app on Windows, German Read Aloud output is poor with both available voices. On top of that, the male voice additionally reads German with a heavy English accent and mispronounces a large share of German words.

Issue 1 — Male voice applies English pronunciation to German text

With the male voice selected, German text is read with a continuous English accent, from the first word to the last. Many German words are pronounced completely wrong — especially anything containing umlauts (ä, ö, ü) or the letter combinations "ch" and "ei". In parts of longer responses the output becomes genuinely unintelligible.

This is not a preference about which voice sounds nicer — the male voice appears to apply an English pronunciation model to German text.

Issue 2 — Overall German voice quality is low with both voices

Switching to the female voice removes the English accent, so it is the better of the two. But it is not good either. Both available voices sound noticeably artificial and unnatural in German compared to the text-to-speech in other assistants I use daily. As a native German speaker, listening to longer responses is tiring rather than convenient with either voice.

Only two voices are selectable in total. Since one of them is effectively unusable for German due to the accent problem, that leaves a single voice for German-speaking users — and that one is mediocre at best.

Environment

• Official Claude Code desktop app
• OS: Windows 11
• Content language: German
• Voice language setting: German
• Cross-check: Claude iOS app, female voice — no English accent there either, but the same limited quality

Steps to reproduce

1. Open the Claude Code desktop app on Windows
2. In settings, select the male voice
3. Have Claude produce a longer answer in German
4. Click the Read Aloud button under the message
5. Listen: English accent, wrong pronunciation, partly unintelligible
6. Switch to the female voice and replay the same answer
7. Listen: the English accent is gone, but the delivery is still clearly artificial

Expected behavior

Both voices read German text with correct German pronunciation and at a quality level comparable to the English voices.

Actual behavior

The male voice reads German with an English accent and is partly unintelligible. The female voice pronounces German correctly but still sounds artificial. Neither is pleasant to listen to for longer German text.

Additional notes

This is not a local Windows SAPI voice — the German voices installed on my machine (Hedda, Katja, Stefan) sound different from what is played back, so the audio appears to be server-side.

Requests here: fix the English pronunciation model on the male voice, raise German voice quality in general, and offer more than two voices per language.

Possibly related: #72123 (Read Out Loud degrades mid-playback on Windows 11) and #33158 (voice dictation misrecognizes German as English).