iOS 17 Beta, VoiceOver, findings and observations

By Amir, 6 June, 2023

Forum
Apple Beta Releases

So after the huge hype, I just managed to update an iPhone 14 Pro Max to iOS 17 Beta. My observations follow:
1. I'm using Alex as my default voice. As iOS 17 came up, I noticed that Alex is using a relatively lower speech rate. My rate was 57 with iOS 16 and it was still set to 57. So I had to increase it a bit to replicate the iOS 16 experience. 58 or 59 does it I'd say.
2. Now VoiceOver voices have an extra Rotor option upon landing on each voice name in the Speech window of VoiceOver settings. So, apart from "Speak sample" we now have the "Open per-voice settings" Rotor item. But the more remarkable point is that for Eloquence voices we can adjust more settings compared with, say, Alex. With Eloquence we can adjust roughness, breathiness, pitch, and, more crucially, utilize a higher sample rate.
3. Of course, since Eloquence should apparently keep bugging us one way or another, the higher sample rate setting, which is now the default option, generates a noticeable sibilant sound especially when Eloquence utters "s" and "z" sounds. This is the first time I've heard Eloquence so sibilant over the past 2 decades. Of course, reducing the sample rate gets rid of the sibilance but re-introduces the so called older muffled/boxiness. Moreover, it seems that this updated Eloquence doesn't support user community dictionaries! As such, words like "Gmail" and "assistive" are still mispronounced - quite sorely!
I'll keep this post updated in the comments section. What else have you, early beta testers, found?

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Comments

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

So the Rotor option for Siri voices is there, but opening it displays a window with zero settings - unlike Alex or Eloquence voices.

By Dherion on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

You are reporting all these errors in feedback asistant, right?

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Definitely! I think every responsible tester should do it, and I'll get started with reports shortly.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

The section of the Weather app which displays forecasts for the next 10 days has been altered in a way that one needs to utilize an extra flick to move to the next/previous days. That is, each day's name is surrounded by an extra control which VoiceOver's Image description, quite oddly, calls "Blue sky." If Image description is turned off, VoiceOver says nothing and just dings as that extra control is reached via left/right flicks. Double-tapping or holding that control does nothing.

By ming on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

does it have any new voices for english?

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Not that I can tell. Checking the English section of the Speech settings for VoiceOver reveals no new voices.

By Falco on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Hello,

Can you maybe check What dutch voices are available.
There is the Flemish dutch voice called Ellen. I am wondering if you can choose between different quality of the voice.

By Levi Gobin on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

This morning, I noticed that Siri voices are a lot smaller. and when I say a lot, voice 4 uses 66 MB. This decreases the lag. If that wasn't good enough, the Siri voices are now powered by a machine learning language model. What this means is that the voices are powered by AI, or something similar to amazon's polly.
Note, if you try to add the Siri voices to activities, the older larger ones still show up.
it took a while for the new voices to show up, because when I checked last night, the voices were the same large voices from iOS 16.
For those who remember, Back in Mac OS Monterey, Siri voices were powered by a different language model which made the voices powered by ai as well. I liked the sound of that particular language modle, but apple created a brand new one because the old one lagged.
As far as any other changes related to VoiceOver, I have yet to find any.
I will note that the Nicky voice is broken. Don't use it or you will los speech

By Devin Prater on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Battery widget is broken. It says something like "power.bolt" and takes a lot of flicks to go through. Reporting soon.

By roman on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

do we have different settings for the speech rate option? Unlike macOS, there are not many speech rate options you can set an iOS. And the pressing and holding button is not as consistent as for example swiping down or up to increase or decrease the speech rate via one value.

By Manuel on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Speech rate is still only customizable using swipe up/down or by holding the finger and swipe slowly to the left/right. I've not found any other option yet.

By Chris on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

What does this mean? Do you mean it opens a menu to adjust voice parameters independently for each voice such as speech rate?

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Very true! I also received the smaller-sized Siri voices a few hours after installing iOS 17 Beta, and had to re-downloaded some of them. To be honest, I don't like them much - they sound better than their larger-sized siblings, but, IMO, Microsoft has done a noticeably better job with their AI-powered voices for Narrator in Windows 11. Smaller Siri voices are still miles away from the so-called online voices Siri uses. Of course, TTS is a subjective matter. BTW I prefer Siri voice 4 for US English - as before. And if you sample the smaller Siri voices, they now utter their distinctive male and female names.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

@Chris Yes - though what opens is more of a window rather than a menu. And as I mentioned earlier, some voices (namely Siri/Vocalizer ones) don't have any adjustable settings in that Window. Alex has a rather limited set of options, and Eloquence has the most comprehensive ones. You can also revert to default if you wish.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Don't know what is causing that, but here Siri can perform no online tasks. Ask it to identify songs, report the weather forecast, play the latest news, play a song, etc., and it'll just utter a sentence akin to "something went wrong." It can perform on-device tasks, though. Furthermore, I've noticed that if the so-called successive Siri commands, without saying Siri or Hey Siri, are supposed to work, they work more consistently with VoiceOver turned off.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

No matter what the status of the Mute switch is, VoiceOver always says, "Unmuted." Muting/unmuting does work, but VoiceOver just says "unmuted," especially if the phone is unlocked and the Mute switch gets toggled.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

@Falco 🫠 Sorry for not being able to help. I don't have Dutch voices at all as I'm using English. I just have all English variants.

By Holger Fiallo on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

I will wait for public beta 2 or 3 to install in my iPad.. Good luck to all of you.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

This is beta software, after all, but VoiceOver seems, and sounds, quite stable. In fact, I haven't seen that pestering, though occasional, VoiceOver audio crash so far. Time will tell if it's still lurking somewhere, though.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Folks, the "Listen to Page" Feature on Safari is fantastic! It is Siri-powered - with a positive flavor I'd say. Just select the "Page settings" button at the bottom of the screen on any webpage, select the "Start listening" option from the available options, and, after a ding, Siri, via its high-quality online AI-powered voices will start reading the contents of the page. You can return to this window to pause/resume listening or, better/more convenient than that, on the Lock screen, move backwards or forwards through text as if you were listening to an audiobook, or pause/resume playback. This is Apple's brilliant stab at a feature Google Assistant has been offering for a while on Android.

By Ipadman on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

iOS 16 introduced an annoying bug where, when swiping the track position of a media file on the lock screen, you could only move the file forward by two or three seconds rather than a percentage of the file as in previous versions.
It makes it difficult to navigate back to where you left off when listening.
Does anyone know if this has been fixed yet?

By Alan on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

in the first ios 17 beta, braille screen input is not working as expected. The send gesture does not work at all, and voiceover anounces every leter, even if you have set the braille screen input keyboard to anounce nothing. really anoying, be careful if you are about to update and need to type a lot of text.
Also, eloquence sounds... weird? not sure how to explain, but definitely has changed for worse.

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Voice is skipping over itself when some words are spoken
This happens on both compact and high-quality versions
IPhone SE 2022

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

I found the dictation has drastically improved in the latest software. It may not be the best but it’s not the worst anymore

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Voice users, you will be happy
Voice on my end no longer crashes and goes to the top of the screen

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

For some reason it won’t say voice over any more it will only say voice

This only happens sometimes, but maybe annoying for certain uses

By Henrik on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

They added the ability to use a higher sample rate, and if I understand it correctly, that's on by default, but you can change it. Also, it almost sounds like the higher sample rate version has a lisp now, but this might get fixed if they could raise the volume of the consonant sounds just a little bit. They seem lower to me somehow. I'm very happy that this got added though.

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

I can make this vocaliser voices sound like Alvin and the chipmunks
Swap up and until you find open pro voice settings and double tap
There should be an option called timber
You can minimise and you can increment and decrement it.
That’s what sounds like a chipmunk LOL

By Igna Triay on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

As I don't have access to the dev betas, so public betas are the only thing I can go for.

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

It seems like VoiceOver won’t let me paste text any more. When I go into the edit area of the rotor and iOS 17, voice won’t let me. There aren’t any options in the edit rotor action

By Gar on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

One thing that jumped out at me is that voiceover, using Eloquence Reed, no longer says the word emoji correctly. I've reported this in the feedback app.

By Dennis Long on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

I installed the beta but don't have the feed back app any ideas how to fix?

By Dennis Long on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Checked both. I submitted feedback through the feedback website.

By Igna Triay on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Not sure if i'm missing something obvious but, when I go into general, software updates, beta updates, I only see two things. Off, and public beta, no third option... is there anything i'm missing?

By JC on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

I'm glad apple is now providing dev updates for free. When I first saw it, I thought at first it was a bug, but after reading sources such as Macrumors and 9to5mac for the official announcement, it's been made official. anyone can install the beta, as long as your Apple ID is linked, and you continue to send feedback to apple via feedback assistant. also, you don't have to wait for later updates, as dev beta updates will be provided faster in future months throughout the beta cycle.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

As for the options in the Edit Rotor action, double-tapping the text field makes them fully available to VoiceOver users. I just tested it in What'sApp. As I typed a couple of letters and tried accessing the Edit Rotor options, nothing was read. However, as I double-tapped the Text box and re-tried, the options appeared and were properly announced.

By wiljames on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Type this in the address bar:

Applefeedback://

Press done or enter after this. The feedback app will open even if you do not see it.

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

Not exactly
It’s just start stops talking after awhile
Again this is software so we will experience bugs

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

You have the audio message heading, like Se for instance
Alex, heading
And then you swapped to the right and the audio message that Alex sent
But voice doesn’t read it
It only says.
Actions available

By Dominic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

When I invoke Siri Siri does the haptic sound but it doesn’t do the starting sound. Everything is okay for the ending sound

By Nikola Jovic on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

@Amir I am a little surprised you didn't find anything interesting in the per voice settings for Alex.
In fact, you can now make Alex much, much faster, even take it up to 900 WPM, which is the same as the boosted speech rates ESpeak provides, and I must say that Alex retains its sound quite well even at higher rates.

As a few others said as well, Vocalizer voices offer a timbre option which seems to adjust the tone of the voice, but I am not sure if that may be unavailable for certain voices, perhaps enhanced or premium? I don't use Vocalizer voices that much anymore, so haven't tested.

The cool thing is that the per voices option works even with 3rd party synthesizers, so if you go there for ESpeak, you'll find all the options you can adjust from the ESpeak app as well. Of course, I still hope they eventually rather turn them into sliders, as adjusting them this way is rather tedious. I mean, I have nothing against a decrement and increment button if somebody really needs precise adjustments, but I certainly don't want to tap a button 50 times to reach a higher value.

I think that's the only new feature.

Reaching the status bar with VoiceOver also seems to be much more difficult, but I suppose this one is just a bug.

By Amir on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 01:24

@Nikola Jovic As someone who uses Eloquence with ultra-high speech rates, when it comes to reading books or articles I still have difficulty understanding Alex at anything above 65 or 70. It seems to be running words together, shortening or omitting word-final syllables even with iOS 17 Beta - to my ears. All that said, it's still my favorite iOS/VoiceOver voice.
As for extra per-voice settings, or setting, for Vocalizer voices, it seems to be rather voice or variant-specific as I haven't seen it - maybe because I have an aversion to Vocalizer voices and haven't downloaded their higher-quality variants.
Finally, you're absolutely right re reaching the Status Bar with VoiceOver. Oftentimes VoiceOver just detects the Dynamic Island area, skipping everything around it. I've noticed that double-tapping the Dynamic Island area restores the Status Bar in most instances though.