I use the Australian male voice or voice 1 as it's otherwise known. It is my default voice. The other day, I put my phone down and when I picked it up to use again, I found it wasn't using my preferred Australian male siri voice, it had switched to the Karen voice instead.
I realised the Australian siri voices no longer appeared as downloaded in my voiceover settings, so went to download them again. I have tried for several days now, 3 to be exact. My siri voice is also set to Australian male. There are times when I use siri, it speaks in lower audio quality, but comes back crystal clear, but still doesn't appear useable from voiceover menu. I've tried leaving them to download overnight, on wifi and off wifi, but in the morning it still says "stop downloading voice 1."
I've tried restarting my phone a few times, but no fix. If anyone has any suggestions, that would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks.
By Andrew90, 20 June, 2023
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
Was your phone charging?
I'm pretty sure you need Wifi to download the voices. saying this, did you have your phone on charge as you left it overnight? i'm sure you did, just tring to think of any other reason. sorry i'm not much more help.
Phone was charging
Yes, my phone was charging. I tried on wifi, and then the next night on 5G just to see what might happen. Both times I left the phone unlocked on the screen where the voice was downloading hoping there would be no interruption but in the morning it still said: "stop downloading voice and didn't give any indication of how much there was left. Very strange.
Siri female Australian just disappeared from my iPad.
I can’t get it back either. I’ve had to use Karen premium. Nothing changed prior to it happening. I just picked up my iPad this morning and it was talking with an American voice. I always use Siri female Australian on every device so I’m pretty gutted I can’t get it back. Karen will do but if she wasn’t there, I’d be really really upset.
Did you fix it yet?
I’m getting more annoyed with Karen now I’ve been used to Siri Australian for a few years. It’s always strange to change to a new voice but I didn’t choose to do this. Siri voices just aren’t available on my iPad anymore. It’s an M1 and it had Siri downloaded, it just disappeared over night. No Siri voices are available to download but Siri is still using the Siri Australian voice. I wish so hard that Apple would sort their damn lives out and stop messing up. It really does cause distress. My hearing isn’t great in lower frequencies which is why I use the Siri Australian voice. It’s by far the clearest for me.
Which OS version?
I'm using the iPadOS 16.6 beta on an iPad Pro. I tried to download Australian Siri voice 1 and was able to. So far, it seems to be working. Maybe the beta fixes something?
It’s finally fixed.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve been restarting my iPad every couple of hours and checking but no Siri voices were available. I tried it a little while ago and the Siri voices are back and downloaded. Everything is back to normal but that doesn’t explain what on earth happened. I’m on an M1 iPad Pro 11 inch running 16.5. It just makes me lose even more faith in my apple stuff. My iPad was stable prior to today. Plenty that could be better and it was running wayyyy slower than it did on iOS 15 but still worked. Now I find out that voices can just disappear for no reason. Today was a bad day for it to happen as I was using the iPad in training at work. I have so little faith in my phone these days in fact I really resent the amount of problems it has but my iPad had been okay until now. Anyway, I’ll put it behind me and fingers crossed nothing else goes wrong.
Thank you for everyone’s input. I will try this again.
Interesting. I’m glad I’m not the only one. I will try it again tonight and see if it works. I’m using an iPhone 12 pro. Running iOS 16.5. I’ve switched to the nuance Lee Australian male voice for now. My iPhone 8 is still running the Siri UK English voice but that phone just used to listen to old podcast episodes and doesn’t have a Sim card in. It appears to only be the Australian voices that are having issues.
It’s now working again!
Happy to report, I updated my phone to 16.5.1, and now I find the voice is downloaded and usable again without me having to do anything! :-)