Question on how to turn off Voiceover pitch Changes

By Jessica Karim, 28 October, 2022

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi everyone,
is there a way to make all the speech match with voiceover on a mac? For example, when in messages, VO will say iMessage, and then iMessage again in a drastically lower pitch. I find this quite annoying to listen to so just wanted to see if there was a way to remove VO pitch changes?
I've played around in system settings but can't seem to figure out how to fix it. I'm running O S 13 on an M1 macbook pro from 2020.
Thanks.

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Comments

By PaulMartz on Sunday, October 30, 2022 - 23:11

I think this can be modified in VO Utility. I'm not sure what the values change, but you can experiment with them and let us know what works.

Open VO Utility. Go to the speech category. Select the Voices tab. Navigate to the Customize Language List, it's a group, interact with it. Navigate to the Edit button to modify your default voice.

This will let you modify values for default rate, pitch, volume, and intonation. Select Additional Voice Options, and you can modify these values for how the default voice speaks in different contexts such as Content, Status, Type, Attributes, and VoiceOver Menu. So, that's four values per six different situations for a total of 24 different parameters you can tinker with.

Hopefully you're more patient than I am. LOL. Good luck, and let us know what works.

By Maldalain on Sunday, October 30, 2022 - 23:11

I do not like the pitch changes, in Pages tables it makes reading horrible. Unfortunately there is no way to fix this, all the values in the speech settings are at fifty, and even if you change them nothing will happen.

By Jesus R on Wednesday, November 30, 2022 - 23:11

Hi,
I just came here to see if anyone else was having the same issue as me. I've looked in many different places in the VoiceOver utility app, and in the peech rotor, with no luck.
Hope there's an update coming to fix this.

By KE7ZUM on Wednesday, November 30, 2022 - 23:11

Yeah I also hear the forced pitches and they drive me nuts. I just can't find a way to change them.

By Angel Blessing on Wednesday, November 30, 2022 - 23:11

If you go into the vo utility, verbosity, then select text and vo over there is an option for pitches when backspacing, and deleting letters, set this to never, and see if this helps.

By Chris on Wednesday, November 30, 2022 - 23:11

This has been a problem for years. VoiceOver changes the pitch to try to be helpful by indicating certain information as far as I can tell, but this is extremely irritating! iOS has the ability to get rid of this, so should macOS. I'll send this to Apple's Accessibility email address.