New Voices in iOS 16

By Logan Spinks, 6 June, 2022

Forum
Apple Beta Releases

Hello everyone! After seeing multiple forums about people wishing for eloquence with VoiceOver, I can report that as of the first beta of iOS 16, Eloquence is finally available. A variety of other voices are also present. If anyone gives the betas a try, let me know what y’all think.

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Comments

By ming on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

I will not get it for now.
I will wait and see

By Josh Kennedy on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

I am currently using I O S 16 beta and iPad OS16 beta, yes eloquence is there along with all apple novelty voices like pipe organ. and eloquence works great! Eloquence on I O S is very very fast and responsive! all the voices are there and it even has the other eloquence languages so if you add mexican spanish you can use eloquence spanish voice to read stuff. this is so excellent oh and eloquence sounds great on my iPad also!

By Jo Billard on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

I doubt I'd use Eloquence, unless it's improved, but I'm very curious about what voices already come with the Mac. I like Alex, but maybe I'll find something better. Maybe something that doesn't have so many huge pauses between sentences.

By KE8UPE on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Hi,
I’m in the process of trying to learn Spanish.
I added Spanish to my voiceover rotor last night, but did not see an option under eloquence, for a Spanish voice.
Where did you find one?

By sockhopsinger on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

I have mixed feelings about bringing Eloquence to iOS. On one hand, I use Eloquence all the time with Windows and maybe I'll be glad to have it. On the other hand ,since we're bringing voices that haven't had their base code updated in forever ,why not port over DecTalk voices too? Come on, surely others would like to hear Perfect Paul? Huge Harry? Whispering Wendy? Beautiful Betty? Doctor ... never mind ppoint made. Or how about the voice from the Accent speech synthesizer? I guess my point is while I will be glad to be able to use Eloquence on iOS, I'd rather Apple bring in better voices like those used by Microsoft with the Edge browser; in other words, work on bringing better clarity to voices not just novelty and outdated voices.

By Vsevolod Popov on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Hi! Oh, that is something I could never, never think of! I could expect old macOS voices being added! But Eloquence! Wow!!!!! As far as Spanish, yeah, eloquence supports both variants of Castelian and Mexican Spanish. Eloquence isn't available for Russian, but I think I'll use it for Spanish too!

By Clare Page on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Hi! Understandably, there's a lot of talk of Eloquence in the blind community since it was announced that it will be added to IOS 16, as so many blind people love it: I don't, but each to their own taste in voices, of course! I gather it's not the only new voice, new to IOS I mean, so I was wondering, does anyone know what other new voices will be included in IOS 16?

By Josh Kennedy on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

for those testing IOS16, if you want novelty voices to speak correctly set rate to 0 before using the voice.

By Ann Marie B on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Hi. As mentioned in previous comments, I am also curious as to what alternative voices there are in iOS 16. I also have mixed feelings about eloquence.

By Trenton Matthews on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

All Freedom Scientific voices (as of JAWS 2022) along with 'every single' Macintosh original Novelty voice, shall arrive.
NB. As of IOS 16 Dev 1 (which I will not touch period), some of the new vocalizer voices now even hav their 'high-premium' versions, such as Samantha who's gotten a "voice lift", and Zoe who almost sounds like Nora the Siri voice, but y'all be the judge on that...

By Trenton Matthews on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

If you're wanting to try iOS/IPadOS 16 out for yourself early, Public Beta Testing begins in July of this year. No official start date given at this time.

NB. Install at yur own risk!

By ming on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

besides eloquens voices.
does it has any new voices as well.?

By Amir on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Yes - for up to 20 new languages and dialects, and some more voices for existing ones.

By Amir on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

@ming I can't, and shouldn't, dissect the nitty-gritty of this here for obvious reasons, but yes, it brings iOS on a par with the Vocalizer voices you get with JAWS 2022, and the so-called Novelty ones are also there.

By roman on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

I also wanted to know about other voices besides Eloquence! Though I love my text to speech buddy, I will appreciate if we talk about other voices. For example, which voices are edited from the vocalizer for the different English Accents besides other languages which has mentioned in the apple press..

By Ann Marie B on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

I am pleased tio hear there are upgrades to existing voices as well as various other voices besides eloquence. :)

By sockhopsinger on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Instead of porting all of these ancient voices over from Freedom Scientific, I would prefer they spent more time focusing on Apple's Siri voices to make them more responsive and pronounce better to make them work better with Voiceover. It seems much more prudent than bringing over all of the old voices. I am glad to have more choice, but to me this direction makes more sense.

By Logan Spinks on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Other voices that are present include all of the voices from the Mac, including the novelty ones. also, voices such as Nathan and Zoey from nuance and a few new nuance voices that I’ve never heard of are available. Edit: Alex on iOS is fully on par with the Mac version as far as I can tell. The speech rates seem to finally be equal between them.

By Amir on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

To be honest, I'd like to see neural Siri voices be enhanced similar to what Microsoft have done with Narrator natural US English voices in Windows 11 22H2. Yes, unlike their online/server-based counterparts, they still have mispronunciations and, regrettably, Narrator doesn't have a pronunciation dictionary facility, but in terms of intonation and overall intelligibility they soundly beat all of the voices I've ever heard. Quite remarkably, each voice occupies almost 12MB of disk space, and my hope is to see such voices on iOS and macOS sooner rather than later.

By Logan Spinks on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

As I had mentioned earlier, Alex got an upgrade on iOS to bring him up to par with the Alex on the Mac. I just updated to Mac OS 13, and Alex also unfortunately got a major speed boost there too. Hopefully they scale it back on the Mac and leave it where it’s at on iOS to bring them both in line with each other. As of now, 95% is absolutely unrealistic on the Mac, when it used to be my normal. I’d like to see both versions be exactly the same so I can have all of my VO settings the same across devices. I know it’s a small complaint, but it would be nice. I’ve always had to set my phone’s speaking rate at least 10% faster, which doesn’t make any sense considering they should be the exact same voice. Do y’all experience this as well?

By Zachary on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Just let us set the speed in terms of WPM instead of percentage. MacinTalk already supports this if you use their speech mark up, so it shouldn't be that hard to implement. Could someone maybe submit feedback on this?

By Logan Spinks on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

That would be a nice change. Setting a percentage is not the most intuitive when related to WPM. I would like to see that implemented as well.

By Brandt on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Hi,

Zachary and Logan has a very good point here.

I know I can use the Vocaliser Tessa voice at about 300 WPM, and eloquence at about 500, but the percentage for each screen reader is drastically different.

Using a WPM slider in place of the percentage sliders makes a lot more sense, to me anyway.

Maybe I'm just an old style computer user stuck in the early 90s, but I've never thought about changing away from the percentage thing until now.

By Kerie on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

honestly what is wrong with some people???? It really annoys me when no matter what happens all people do is complain.
Give us a synth we've wanted for years, thats stupid. It's not there, I wish they would.....
They haven't brought it over because no one wanted it, and I for one am delight to see eloquence come to IOS, and if people are not then that's fair enough, but why constantly whine? A lot of us have wanted this for a long time, and apple bringing it on board shows they do listen to us. Honestly when I see stuff like this it makes me embarrassed to be part of the blind Community

By Dennis Long on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

That is the best news of the year!!!!Once again Apple listens to the users. Thank You Apple!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By Kerie on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

agree 100 percent!!!!! best news indeed!!!!!

By DrummerGuy on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

I would like to know if there are new Spanish voices or if the existing ones have gotten an upgrade.
Thank you.

By Gordie on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

I had listened to the latest podcast with Thomas going through the US English voices, which will be on iOS 16, including all of the Eloquence voices. I'm curious which others will be coming aboard, which also speak English, as I like to create an activity for each voice. Anyone know which will be new in Australian, British, Irish, South African English, etc.?

By Leela on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

This is just a theory, but when apple decided to put new ARM chips into the new macs, I think it was then they started trying to configure the other Mac voices to work on IOS. I don't think it was storage space, because all of those voices are pretty small from what I've heard. So it was probably just getting them to work with the different chips that proved challenging. Now the macs and Iphones both use ARM chips, so maybe that's why we finally got the Mac voices on IOS. It's just a theory and I am not a computer expert. I just heard about this from a youtube channel called Cold Fusion.

By Falco on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Hello,

Can someone who is running the beta tell what the Dutch (Dutch and Belgian) voices that are possible to choose from in iOS 16?

Thanks

By Exodia on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Wait a sec, are we actually getting the novelty voices such as pipe organ, bells, bubbles, cello, bad news, good news, zarvox, trinoids and all the others? I actually did not hear those listed in all the voices that were listed in the latest podcast. Maybe they’re coming in later betas. But I am just wondering if we are actually getting those voices.

By Daniel Angus M… on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

So in Thomas Donville’s podcast detailing the non US voices, he shows the novelty voices. He also challenges the listeners to try to be productive using the bubbles voice with VoiceOver.

By Exodia on Friday, June 24, 2022 - 07:21

Yes, I just heard that podcast. It’s going to be fun messing around with all those different voices.

By Alan on Sunday, July 24, 2022 - 07:21

Is there any way to get in touch with Apple and get Apple to join The Chinese Voice of The Evolution? In addition Chinese all vocalizer sounds are only the sound of the compact. It's so unfair.

By Levi Gobin on Saturday, September 24, 2022 - 07:21

Somewhere else on this form topic, I read that someone wished that A WPM slider would be in place of the percentage slider for speaking rate. I think that would be perfect. I don’t know what WPM I like my voiceover at, but I think it would be very nice and useful. If anyone else like me once that, we should report it to Apple and see if they could make a toggle between percent and WPM.