What are people's opinions on Eloquence

I don't like Eloquence, would never use it. I think it's better if we're able to download it then it coming preinstalled and then taking up my storage. Some thing that might be nice about it is that it more predictable than high quality voices, some of them have inflection issues and are more unpredictable. When swiping through the homescreen or an email you don't have to worry about VO saying certain words as if it's yelling at you, or like something's a question when it's not, etc etc but so Eloquence would be a good voice for people who want more predictability. My favorite voice on Eloquence is Shelley, because she sounds the most natural, and my least favorite is Sandy because it sounds the most muffled, like it's calling to you from another room.

Was expecting to be as good as my Windows PC but the quality is not even close. It feels like there are 2 types, Windows and Apple. Apple feels like they just gave it to those who wanted it to get them from keep asking for it. So it is Do not ask for what you want, you might get it.

For me, none of the more natural-sounding voices compare to Eloquence. As someone who has used JAWS since 2002, I was really excited to see Eloquence come to iOS and jumped on the first iOS 16 beta immediately after it was released to developers after WWDC. While Freedom Scientific's pronunciation dictionary for Eloquence appears to be a lot more comprehensive than Apple's at the time of writing, generally speaking, my experience is that Eloquence sounds similar on Apple platforms as it does on Windows. The differences I observe are similar to that which one would find between, say, the JAWS version of Eloquence and the Code Factory version.

It's a light weight voice, particularly in the situation I'm going through where 16's lagging my phone down on certain apps. I just wish there was a way to increase its inflection like you can in NVDA for the Windows PC.

As a long time user of Windows/jaws myself, version 3.3, I think that might be 1998, I was extremely disappointed in the transfer and implementation of eloquence on the Apple platform. The Jaws voice sounds like they have shoved a cup over its face or something. Very muffled. It just didn't transfer well, in my opinion. I was so wanting to be able to switch to Jaws, as I have wanted it for a long time. I find that, when using it on my PC, I have no listener fatigue, can read at high rates of speed, with full comprehension, and the voice is properly robust, but not overly soul. On the Apple side of things, it just is a miserable fail for me. Very disappointed in the process that Apple did. I can't understand why, if it is the same eloquence, it did not transfer over properly. I also feel like Apple just patted us all on the head and said, there you go little one, now shut up. You got what you wanted. Leave us alone. Be happy. I feel the same way about all of those novelty voices,in the new section. Those are a disgrace. I can't believe that Apple even considered putting them on an iOS device. I want my memory space back.

Lol Rant over.

Hi all. I personally am happy with the way apple implemented eloquence on IOS 16. For those who say it isn’t exactly like the jaws version, I would have to agree. I think it is the code factory version, rather than the one freedom scientific adds to jaws. Having said that, I personally don’t mind a few mispronounciations here and there, I fix them with the pronounciation editor in voiceover and go on about my day. I find it quite disheartening when I read, time after time, how someone doesn’t like this or that about apple or a particular voice. Frankly, it gets old after a while. If you don’t like a particular voice, don’t use it or send feedback to apple about it. If you don’t like apple as a whole, switch to android or even the blind shell classic 2 smartphone that has recently come out. Also, remember that apple is a multi million or perhaps even billion dollar company with probably a rather small accessibility team in the grand scheme of things, and they only way things might get fixed or upgraded is if people submit constructive criticism to apple, rather than coming out here on a forum and whining about it. No one made you use a particular voice, or even apple itself. Sorry for this being so long. Rant over and I hope everyone has a nice day.

As a long time windows and Jaws user since 2005, I was happy to hear that eloquence would be on iOS, so as soon as WWDC concluded, I jumped on it right away after the first beta was released to developers. for my voice preference, I use flow, with the speed set to 30%, and pitch set to 0%, as the default pitch is too high, and the speech rate is too fast for me to understand. that's my preference for me, everyones preference is different. overall, Apple has listened to their customers, and I'm happy to see that eloquence is finally on iOS.

As someone who heavily utilizes Eloquence on Windows, I was looking forward to its debut on iOS. However, given its muffled audio quality and certain strange quirks such as pauses after capital letters like say, Cap, g, instead of Cap g upon spelling words or nabigating letter by letter, I don't use it. In fact, I'd like to echo Roxann Pollard's opinions wholeheartedly!

I keep jumping between Read and Eddy US voices. Yesterday my choice was Read with pitch %45 and speed %50 and I don't look back. Currently on IOS 16.1 Beta 2. If you prefer Eddy you can set pitch to %40. Nothing and PLEASE this is only my personal opinion,, is better than Eloquence apart from Tessa compact voice. Thanks for the tip about Flo. Going to play around with her now

Now hear this strange occurance: Under settings, Accessability, VoiceOver, Audio, Sounds and Haptics, I turned off Sounds and turned on Haptics with Haptic intencity %85 and Eloquence Read and Eddy sounds much better than the reverse order of sounds and haptics even when my iPhone 13Pro's volume are turned up very loud. Try it out

I personally don't like Eloquence and I never missed it.
I grew up using Eloquence, but when new voices came, I stopped using Eloquence and never looked back.
I am happy that Apple brought it back for those who were very nostalgic and asked for it. After all, it is good to have choices.
Nowadays, I am using Siri voices and, sometimes, I use Alex, Nathan, Evan and Zoe.
I just wish there was a way to remove eloquence from my device, for I think it is just a waste of memory, in my case, that is.

I have switched back to flow. speed at 30% and pitch at 0%. my preferred easy to understand voice

I think in her sample she sounds like she's running around and panting, and in a rush. Yes Flo is faster than the other ones I think.

If you use the speach rate setting in the VoiceOver rotor you can set it to %50. It is a notch slower than the %51 setting, but at least the %50 does not sounds extremely slow as it does in IOS 16.0 and 16.02

I still hear aprostrophie whenever quotes are found even with non eloquence voices

Given I use code ffactory's elequence with nvda on windows... this is the same, so no big deal. I'm really glad elequence got added, although I find it funny that someone said to have elequence available for download rather than coming preinstalled.. I mean eloquence voices in total, take up less than 100mb if not less. Its not such a big deal imo.
As to people complaning that its not jaws! etc, if you don't like it, you don't have to use it, but this complaining of its not jaws! is getting old, to be honest. I mean we've asked for eloquence on ios and mac for god knows how long, we get it... and most of you find one or another reason to complain... I mean, what else do you want" Some complaints are valid, such as it saying apostrophy when reading, I believe this is do to quotation marks, but I could be wrong... but complaining just because, oh this isn't jaws! Come on, that's just wining for the sake of wining, nothing else, and its detting really old, really quickly. ' Its not jaws's elequence, but so what. Frankly I prefer this elequence, but that's just me me, i've never been a big fan of jaws to begin with. In all seriousness though, if you don't like elequence, don't use it. Its as simple as that. But wining like in some of the earlier posts in this topic, 1, gets really, really old, really fast; and 2. Plenty of people enjoy it, no one is forcing you to use it.

To previous poster, if it is the same please as Nvda can I set up a rule to stop apostrophies being read whenever an opening quote is detected?

Hello,
Some people say the quality is bad etc but I think its good enough and I use it.

Haha, why are synthesizer choices so contentious? As a longtime JAWS user I love that Eloquence is on iOS finally. I do agree it is not quite JAWS smooth. The biggest thing is I think iOS adds in some pauses in speech like adding commas to the speech stream that probably make Alex sound better than they make Reed.
Good news though, it costs you nothing to give it a try and the setting can be undone or changed on a whim!
If we are going to complain about voices, I'd like to know why pitch settings are only adjustable via the VoiceOver swipe gestures in 10% increments, this is extreme.

Hello. When I first heard about eloquence is being added in iOS 16 along with updated nuance and novelty voices I was really interested even if Eloquence doesn't exist for my native language. I installed developer beta and tried it. I could use it with my native language because iOS has language switcher, it's not ideal but it exists. That's the reason why I couldn't and cannot use Eloquence on Windows. It seems like Eloquence from Jaws 3 was added, I remember some podcast demonstrating that and there was a voice flow which doesn't exist in newer versions of Jaws or Ibm tts implementation for NVDA. I use Tom as my default voice now, I like new version much more than old one, but I am glad that Eloquence was added for those who really needed it and waited for it!

Eloquence is the best! I use it for reading non-supported languages like my native language, danish, as well. It'll pronounce anything, and never resorts to spelling words. Also I love its handling of exclamation marks.

My default voice does say some words with exclamation marks like it's yelling at me but I've gotten used to it. Are you saying Eloquence doesn't do that?

Amir mentioned the pauses encountered when reading capital letters with Eloquence. To mitigate that, I've changed the option in VoiceOver>Verbosity settings to "Change Pitch" and now there is no pause at all when reading by character, and encountering a capital letter. There are some quirks to Eloquence, but overall, I am beyond thrilled they added it to iOS. We can test, (and send feedback), to help improve it for future versions.

Yes, you can, but just keep in mind something else might crop up. For instance, I put a rule in punctuation to stop it saying apostrophe and it stopped, but in some cases where apostrophes where present, igna's apple watch, for example, it would say, igna s applewatch. Honestly i'm unsure if its apostrophes causing this, or quotation marks that voiceover is interpreting as apostrophies.

I agree this is the code factory version. It's not a perfect substitute, and weirdly like to read voices with it for nostalgia sake but not use it to navigate so that's what I do.

Yes, it needs improvement, and I'm sure it will get better with updates, especially if we keep on giving constructive feedback. it is still by far my favorite TTS. I use Eddie at 50% pitch at 75% speech rate. I only wish that it had also been included on Apple Watch and TV so that I can finally say that Samantha is totally out of my life.

I am a long-time user of Eloquence with JAWS on a Windows computer. I have used Eloquence since 2000. Apple's implementation of the Reed voice does leave a little to be desired in terms of the word pronunciation dictionary, but Eloquence works for me extremely quicly and with minimal inertia. I notice this mostly when I enter information using Braille Screen Input. The best voice, in my view, is the Reed voice. I have already tweaked the pronunciations a bit. Thank you Apple.

I like Reed, but he talks too fast. I can only change the speech rate by 10 percent jumps when I go to settings//speech. 58 percent is too fast and 48 percent too slow. Is there another way to slow him down a little?

well,
I think it is good and fast.
and I like it.

Use the rotor to change the speech rate. Then it only changes in 5% increments. You can also try to get more precise by double-tapping and holding on the rate slider and then moving your finger left or right, but that can be tricky.
I love JAWS Eloquence, but I don't really care for the quality of Eloquence on iOS. It sounds quieter than other voices and just not as clear to me. I wish this wasn't the case since I would love to be able to use it.

Hi everybody. I'm not yet on iOS 16 since I still own an iPhone 7, but wish to comment here anyway. First off, I think it's awesome that Apple saw fit to somehow include Eloquence in iOS 16 and Mac OS Ventura. I used that TTS under Windows and really liked it. It will be interesting to use it on Apple products now, but I know I'll eventually get adjusted and the TTS will get adjusted to its new abode, lol! Regarding all the complaining that's been going on...I'll say what others have said. That is, if ya don't care for a particular voice and/or other feature, then don't use it. Additionally, those who for whatever reason are dissatisfied with Apple are free to go elsewhere for their technology needs. So there ya have it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

I hope we can add third party voices to voice over in the near future

As I write this on my bluetooth keyboard and using Eloquence, I am finding that Eloquence is not announcing the punctuation on the soft keyboard as other synthesizers do. No matter what my setting for punctuation is set to, same results happen. Other than that, I like Eloquence. However, I do find myself switching back to Alex, as it sounds more natural to this ecosystem.

Hello everyone. In response to those who think way too many people complain here, when they don't like something, I do agree. In my post, listed above, I was simply expressing my thoughts about the implementation of the new eloquence voice. In no way was I wanting my post to be seen as nothing more than a complaint. That was not my intention. In my opinion, Apple has done a absolutely smashing job, as it pertains to accessibility. I was just disheartened, because I don't feel the eloquence was implemented very well. It must, as others have said, be the code factory version, and not the Freedom Scientific version, that I have always used. If I have offended some here, with my viewpoint, my apologies. I was simply trying to add my perspective to this thread.

Hi!
Sorry if I was unclear. What I ment was that I like how eloquence consistently emphasizes exclamation marks. I find that other voices are slightly vague about them sometimes.

Best
Malthe

I use Reed, pitch 50 percent and speaking rate 70. I figured out that if I turned the volume down in the rotor from 100 percent to 80 percent, some of the clicking disappeared. It amazes me how fast I can type now!

Hi!
Thank you! That was helpful.
From A.W.

I tried using it for 2 weeks but I could not get use to it coming out of my iPhone 12 pro speakers. Using it with headphones was good but just the way it sounded on my phone speakers my ears did not like it. Maybe they will fix the quality later on and I will give it another try.

Hi! I have just set Reed as my second English voice and noticed that the difference between 50 and 55% speed is extremely huge! It's like changing it in 10% value! Otherwise I am glad that I can understand it. In NVDA for example it's really difficult to set the normal, not fast speech rate in IBM TTS

Hello. I had a play with eloquence on my iPhone 12 and it sounds very muffled to me. I also am a longtime Jaws user and when more natural sounding voices came to Jaws I stopped using eloquence. I currently use Zoey on my phone and Ava at work. For those who love eloquence, more power to you. This is why it's good to have choices. :)

When I first heard Eloquence was coming to Apple devices I thought, "I don't like it! Leave that over on Windows and/or Android!" Then... I installed it on the beta on my iPad and my mind quickly changed. Once I finally got over the oddness that was a JAWS sounding voice coming out of my Apple device, I realized it was very responsive, and it is now the main voice used on my phone as well.

I will admit the pronunciation of some things could use some work, and I don't like the delay when using Braille screen input. Otherwise though, I am loving the experience.

I did however put a second US English setting on my rotor and can change to Alex if I need to. Options are good.

I checked Eloquence on multiple devices, SE 2 and Iphone 13 briefly) and on Iphone 12 as my daily driver. I don't find Eloquence muffled or quieter. Since other voices, (especially Ava Enhanced voice which I was happily using on IOS 15) have degraded, I see no way but to settle on Eloquence for now.

When I first heard Eloquence back in the early 2000's, I didn't like it at first, especially the female voices. But I grew to liking the Reid voice after a while, and found myself sticking to that any time I used Eloquence with JAWS, or NVDA. Now using it on iOS 16.0.2, and loving it, although, I found there was too much of a speed difference between 50 percent and 45 percent, with 45 being way too slow. 50% is just fine for me, although, if I want to show someone something, I'd like there to be a speed that still resembles human speed below 50 percent.
One thing I noticed that I really like is the fact that if you lower the voice over volume to 0, for whatever reason, you can still hear eloquence faintly enough at 1% volume. I've heard of one too many cases where someone inadvertantly zeroed their voice over volume and could not hear anything after that, except the voice over sounds, of course, which made things rather panick inducing, to say the least. The only other voice I've seen this where you can still hear it faintly at the lowest volume is Alex. So, to me, that's a plus with Eloquence.
BTW, I still don't like any of the female voices with Eloquence. Eddie is my choice of voice anymore in iOS, with Reid being my second choice.

Hi,
As some other people above have mentioned, 16.1 is in Beta. Currently, there is a bug, where Voiceover won’t say very many punctuation marks, if you’re using eloquence. This bug presents itself while typing.
It’s still present in the beta that came out today. I know this, because I tested it earlier.

I wish they'd all just get rid of this percentage thing.

Freedom Scientific introduced it way back when they changed from Henter-Joice.

Before that, the speech rate was based on words per minute.

Now, every company is basing the speech rate using percentage instead of words per minute, and look at the result.

%50 can sound faster with one synthesizer, only for it to have a different rate with another.

Speech rate can use words per minute, I'm not sure what you could use for volume, maybe decibels?

Then we're left with pitch.

I'm not sure what you could use to measure the pitch, but I suppose with the percentage method, it's consistent across the board.

The way I have figured this out is this:

The problem is caused by "opening single quotation mark" sign. It is interpreted as apostrophe by Eloquence. But the sign cannot be found in the punctuation list while customising punctuation group. There is either "apostrophe" or "quotation mark" and replacing/removing them does not solve the problem.

Hence I copied the "open single quotation mark" sign whereever I found it and pasted it on the "choos punctuation" edit box. Then selected "remove" under rule. Now behaving as expected.

Hope I explained correctly and that helps!

As many here, I have used Eloquence with JAWS since Noah built his ark. That being said, I have no problem with the way it reads on an iPhone. However, here is the problem. When having it set as my primary voice with Voiceover, it does not always read when backspacing using braille screen input. Needless to say, it is not my primary voice anymore. I'm glad we have it as an option but it is not one that I will be using often. Frankly, like others have already stated, I wish we had the option to remove it and the rest of those ridiculous novelty voices. I realize that in the scheme of things they may not take up much space, but for some of them, any space is too much. Give me some DecTalk voices any day over some of this stuff.

It is my go to synth on windows but on my IPhone not so much. The sound quality is bad. It reminds me of the talks screen reader from back in the day.

Perhaps it's because I didn't know any better but on the IPhone it honestly sounds bad.

Also, I've tried the irish siri female voice and she won't say they if you read by word, it's strange.

I'm back to using Alix.

Absolutely! Eloquence sounded much better on my old N82 Nokia handset with Nuance TALKS&ZOOMS, and, courtesy of the late Torsten and Marcus, it also fully supported Eloquence pronunciation dictionaries. TALKS had 2 Eloquence releases: one with pronunciation dictionaries and, for phones with less RAM, one without them. Now back to the iPhone, with Alex and, say, Siri voices, we get a type of speech clarity that, IMO, we fully deserve, so the same should be the case with Eloquence - and it's absolutely doable. I like Eloquence a lot, but can't switch to it unless it sounds less muffled and boxy.