Explanation to all of you who are confused about the voices in iOS 7

By Adi Kushnir, 19 September, 2013

Forum

iOS and iPadOS

Hi all, As one who uses the new Nuance Vocalizer Expressive voices to develop with them for other platforms, I wanna to explain to you all, what are the iOS 7 voices and which of them are being used when. So, let's start from sirie: The new and better Sirie voices are not Vocalizer Expressive voices. These are custom voices that Nuance or some other company makes a specially for Apple, I think it's Nuance because Apple always works with them on TTS related stuff. Now, let's move on to VoiceOver: In iOS 6, Apple used the Nuance Vocalizer for automotive version 5.5 platform for it's screen reader and Sirie. Since Nuance stopped supporting and developing Vocalizer for Automotive, and released Vocalizer Expressive, in iOS 7, Apple has swiched to using these voices for VoiceOver. Most of them sound the same as the previous generation of Vocalizer, such as Samantha Premium for example, they just read longer texts better. The Vocalizer Expressive platform contains some new and very expressive voices, but Apple decided to use the ones that wer already available, because they are still offerd with Vocalizer Expressive, or VE for short. Some other facts that thanks to them you can know it's the new Expressive version, are the bad compact voices, a specially Daniel, and the new voices for some languages such as Arabic, they have replaced Maged with Tarik for this language because Nuance doesn't offer Maged any more. Vocalizer Expressive has a Hebrew voice as well, so I hope Apple will add it soon too:) (Smile). Hope now you understand it better.. Adi.

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Comments

I'm using the Austrailian

I'm using the Austrailian voice. The expressive and unpredictable quality of the new voices in IOS7 is what I'm finding very annoying. The panunciation of words is very off at times and it won't always pronounce a word in the same way for example in the notification centre, there are two times where the word tomorrow appears but each time Voiceover reads it slightly differently. Also whilst in the photo app, I noticed that it kept changing the way it read the word 'England' but there seems to be no pattern to why it changes the prenunciation. Once it read it correctly but on the next instance it read it as Englaarrnd. Also the process of enabling premium voices is not intuative and you can't always tell if you've downloaded the premium voices or not.

Not only that

But the Australian voice, which is the one I use even though I'm in America because it is about the only decent English voice Nuance has put out and Apple has made available, cuts off a lot of words. For instance, when I'm on the home screen and go to the App Store, the Australian voice pronounces it App Sto. You're telling me Apple can't produce a better product than that? While I realize that these voices are not Apple voices, surely they can listen and be like "wait a minute! We can do better than putting out a product that doesn't even pronounce words right!"

Yes I know. I'm surprised

Yes I know. I'm surprised other people aren't noticing these bugs. The end of words repeatedly keep being clipped off. I found the Austrailian voice to be the clearest in the past but now none of the voices are as good as in IOS6.