Voices in iOS 16

Using Nathan but he is not that great compare to the Nathan from windows. All voices are not that great. Using 12 pro.

I am using American Siri female voice number three. To me, it sounds good.
I have no problem understanding what it says and punctuation sounds good, too.
In fact, the only complain I have is that I wish I could delete eloquence on my device.
I think that one of the reasons why voices sound better on Mac is because of intonation.
We need that on iOS as well.

Agnes, Bruce, Kathy, and Vicki go into the same category as Victoria and Fred—Voices that have been compressed to a pulp so that someone with only about 2GB of storage can snag them. The worst in my oppinion is Kathy. Poor Kathy has this staticky sound whenever she says a T or an S.
Ava has also seemed to have been compressed to a slightly chunkier pulp, taking up only 9MB of storage, and sounding way different. And by chunky, I do also mean she sounds chunky—as in every now and again, she will say some random syllable louder and more pronounced then the others. Ava enhanced and Premium sound basically the same to me.
Joelle and Noelle are really good—Sweet, friendly, a little scratchy, and tied for second best of the new ones.
It took me a good too weeks to figure out what Ralph was saying in his sample. I remember someone mentioning being glad that they were putting in deep voices, and even I love a good deep male voice, but I feel like sometimes, people are trying too hard to make the voices sound deep, and so they just sound like they're rumbling the whole time.
I have seen alot of people complaining about Samantha, and my thoughts are as follows: I have heard the pulpiness of Samantha while on a phone call, or while opening apps that have to use your microphone (for example the Google Meet app) and in comparison to that, the new Samantha actually doesn't sound that bad, but once you listen nice and hard... ... you know something's wrong with her. And Samantha enhanced now sounds even worse!
Evan default sounds like a male version of my old arch Nemesis Nicky default, but Evan enhanced is awesome. Nathan and Zoe also sound awesome, and I'm glad they're on Ios now! Zoe enhanced is first place on my best new voices list.
The novelty voices all sound bad in their own way. The singing ones are the worst. The others are a little better, just with really weird inflections. For a while I thought Albert was saying "I am a frog" instead of "I have a frog in my throat", and he sounds way more like the latter then the former. I remember a while ago, when Thomas Domville issued a challenge in one of his podcasts, to try and use the Bubbles voice productively. I tried, and got used to it in some areas, but not others, and eventually, it just faded into mush, or should a say, a giant never-ending spray of bubbles? With the help of my trusty braille display, I was able to disable it, but man, that was close!
I also like the new indian voices, Isha, Sangeeta, and Veena. Isha is very slow, like she's being very very careful with her words, to make sure they sound as clear as possible. But at least it is actually clear what she's saying, and if I cranked up my speech rate a bit I could probably use it with VO if I wanted to. Sangeeta is just the opposite—Fast and sounding like she's always in a rush. Plus, between the two different versions of the voice, the name Sangeeta is pronounced too different ways. That's a little annoying because I don't know how to pronounce the name. And Veena is right in between. Overall I think the Indian voices are the best.
Serena Premium sound like she says "ello" in her sample, instead of "hello".
That's it. That's my full and complete rant on new voices.

Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Speech > Voice. Go into a voice preview of a voice that isn't already downloaded. Download it but stay in the preview. After it's done click on it. You will find it is Samantha talking, and this new Samantha talker will be very sluggish and almost stop talking all together if you leave it too long. A work around is to exit the preview while the voice is downloading.
Another one. The two voices I know for this are Nicky and Ava. Go into a voice that isn't already downloaded (let's just say Ava). Ava, on my screen, is indicated as to be 9Mb. But after I download it, it's 16 MB! What's up with that? Has anyone experienced these bugs?

Alex is supposed to be 843 mb, but when downloaded, it turns out to be 911 mb. Same is the case with other voices.

Is VO feedback wrong one time or another? What's wrong with the storage?

I wondered about the size as well when downloaded verses not downloaded because they are different.

I have a feeling that the voice files are compressed for downloading, then decompressed on the phone. the size shown initially is the compressed file, and what is shown afterward is the amount of storage being used by the voice data once decompressed.

It's still a little weird though. For this it would be nice to have the option to get either the compressed or the decompressed one. But at least now we have a good idea about what's going on with that. Thank you.

Assuming this is the reason for the size difference, and it makes sense that it is, why would you want the option to download the decompressed (larger) voice file(s)? The compressed download would mean transferring less data resulting in a faster download. I can't think of any benefit to downloading the decompressed file(s). Can you?

Sometimes I could be bad at handling my storage space (who isn't?) but for this matter, I would go quality over quantity. This means I'm okay with moving over some of my stuff so I could make room for a voice that sounds pleasant and actually pronounces things right. This is just my oppinion, as I don't typically download other voices other than my default, unless I'm trying to reproduce a bug or something. Plus, if I don't like the decompressed version, I wouldn't want to here the compressed version. I also can't use the samples, because the sample are being a bit misleading right now.

When we're talking about compressed vs decompressed here, we're not talking about 2 different versions of the voice. The compressed file(s) is like zipping them into an archive. For example, zipping an mp3 audiobook into a zip archive or like downloading a zip archive of an audiobook from BARD. It's just one version of the book.

Some of the voices do have 2 (sometimes 3) versions, but that's different. They each have their respective sizes associated with them, which probably expands once they're downloaded.

Sorry about that, people. I still don't exactly know why it's expanding.

I'm not on iOS 16 or Mac OS Ventura yet but just had to comment. Does anyone know what in the world happened to Jill? I remember her being present when I first started using a Mac, and then she somehow disappeared from view. Much as I have tried to get her back, she won't come back. She was the voice I heard whenever I received the automated call from my local paratransit notifying me of the imminent? arrival of my rides. Turns out I didn't use that for long, but that's a whole topic inandof itself. So please tell me, where the heck has Jill gone? Having said all this, I'm very excited to try out all the voices that are moving in shortly. I used to use Eloquence all the time and it was...well...eloquent! Definitely a bit robotic but very pleasant.

If anybody has heard the Heather voice on VoiceDream and Read2Go (I don't know where it's from), does anyone think the IOS Victoria has started to sound a lot more like Heather since the ios16 update? Ever since I first heard it I thought it did sound like Heather, but now it's increased to an almost unsettling degree that gives me another reason (aside from her just sounding bad in general) to not touch it. Agnes sounds more like the old Victoria.

I found a weird problem with the Jamie, English UK voice, that if you turn voiceover off then back on again that Jamie now miss pronounces some of the words especially ones that begin with a P like personal or personally.
To resolve the situation, I created two languages on the rotor and switch between them to get Jamie to come back again by switching to an alternate language and then back to Jamie.
I have reported this to Apple.
This issue is only with the advanced and the premium Jamie voices

I noticed an issue with the Zoe (Enhanced) voice. It will sometimes read the time with mins and secs instead of hours and mins.

Here's a recording I took of it happening: https://twitter.com/MuseumShuffle/status/1573327904645287937?s=20

So, I watched the video you posted, thanks for posting it here. Then, I opened Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Speech and downloaded Zoe, and then selected it, and went to the status bar. Sure enough, Zoe said "Three minutes and fifty-nine seconds PM".

Hey yawl hope everything is well. I just wanted to comment on how Jaimie said the word person and other words starts with p e r, hope that apple will fix the voices and make them more usable. Thanks!

Hey yawl hope everything is well. I just wanted to comment on how Jaimie said the word person and other words starts with p e r, hope that apple will fix the voices and make them more usable. Thanks!

Hello. As for me, Nathan and Evan sound very similar. Also Kathy and Junior sound like they are under water. Ever since I downloaded Ios 16 I've been using Zoey enhanced. I also have the time issue with Zoey and thaughtit was a bug with the Ios. Hopefully it's fixed in the next update.:) As far as Ava is concerned, I use Ava premium at work. I played with eloquence and the novelty voices and they are not for me.

Concerning the Zoe time issue I haven't noticed a pattern that would indicate whether the wrong time is announced or not. Sometimes it's wrong several minutes in a row and other times it will flip between right and wrong minutes. I did file feedback with Apple about it.

Hello, I've used the British English Siri for eons, as she sounds like a young English woman. Not ot mention the British female Siri is voiced by Finty Williams, a woman who has appeared in many audio plays that I listen to, so it's a bit of a familiar voice for me. The British Siri voice is Daniel Philpott, another familiar voice for me as he has been in many of the same audio plays. However, much to my unpleasant surprise, after IOS updated, I was assaulted by the compact U.S. English Samantha voice. What's more, I go to Voiceover settings, and there are no Siri voices listed. This happened on my iPhone just 15 minutes ago, and I've been struggling on what to do. I don't like the 3 female British voices available, as they all sound old, especially Serena, who should have been named Agnes or something like that, she sounds like the overly proper gran in some of the audio plays I listen to. So yeah, I can't use Siri's British voice or any Siri voice in Voiceover as of late. What the hell, Apple? Why did you take away the most human sounding voices and stick me with that god aweful compact Samantha voice? It just makes me sad, because I need to use voiceover as I'm 100% blind.

Hello. I am using an iPhone 12 and was able to download and successfully use the British Siri voice 1 for voiceover.

I really think that the UK voices needs a proper improvement lol. Jokes aside, Apple should create a voice like Alex for the UK users like myself. Because the only problem with vocaliser is, they do not sound as responsive as Alex, or other novelty voices.

Jill was last seen headed up the hill with Jack, but only Jack came back. A search for Jill is currently underway. <grin>