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I'm new to German, I select Themen aktuell as my textbook, but it confuses me at the very first stage.
Feel free to watch this lesson here. Don't worry, it's very short :)
The speaker pronounces German e as [ei]:
helga ['hɛlga] as ['heilga],
heiße ['haisə] as ['haisei].
Is it a dialect or not?
Helga is pronounced ['hɛlɡaː] in German. Heiße in pronounced ['haɪ̯sə] in German.
The reason why you hear [ei] both times most likely is you are used to a more hushed pronounciation (AE speaker maybe?). This example is over-pronounced because it's a compromise between clarity and the way people actually talk.
In the first seconds of this record a female voice says "Guten Tag, ich heiße Helga Brunner." Her pronuncation of "Helga" and "heiße" is totally in the area of normal. No dialect there.
I would, however, derive from her pronunciation of "Brunner" that she is a resident of Austria; but that's only due to a very faint peculiarity of the pronuncation of the -er here, and does not affect the "Helga" and "heiße".
Note that some of the voices later in the record are clearly from non-native-German-speaking immigrants (Sweden, Russia, etc.) with respective accents. Some others are native speakers of German probably even with training in standard (theatre and broadcasting) pronunciation. It seems the record uses sound bits taken from many different sources.
