If you use Google Search's voice features in the UK, you may have noticed a fairly significant change today — the robotic male voice of old has been replaced with a new, more natural sounding female voice. The change brings the UK in line with the U.S., which has had realistic sounding voice playback for some time now, and it's a vast improvement on what we had before.

It looks like the change has taken place through Google's backend rather than any sort of app update, so Brits should hear the new voice right away — just tap the microphone icon as usual.

We've got a quick preview of the new British voice of Google search after the break.

Thanks to Chris for the tip, and to everyone who helped confirm it!