so what are the new voices in ios 18?

Would love to know if any English voices were added to VO. Thanks.

No new English voices here, not yet anyway. Perhaps when the Apple Intellegence stuff starts rolling out there could be AI voices, but that’s just speculation at this stage.
Dave

I can't imagine they would be limited to iPhone 15 pro either. There is one thing gating the AI aspects of a device, it's very different when it comes to accessibility, a market that, as a rule, has less disposable income. The blow back might be pretty heavy.

Saying that, I really don't care about new voices beyond AI generated audio for long form text. There are far more important issues to fix and provide for voiceover beyond nice voices. As I've said before, once one has become accustomed to a voice, you actually stop hearing it. It's a really interesting aspect of the brain, similar to nose blindness. As a consequence, consistency is more important than human. All we actually need is information transfered from the screen to our understanding with as little friction as possible. . A fancy voice, a human voice especially, might in fact hamper this.

Saying that, the neural voices on windows are very good. They seem to be well mixed for clarity too.

Interestingly, and I don't know if this is a new thing, there is an E.Q. setting in voiceover audio now.

Well Apple comes up with something new, people get upset and Apple just did whatever. People still get iPhones. Regarding AI it will be 15 pro and because the 16 and plus will have the chip of 15 pro, they also could have AI. Is life and apple does what they want, people can move on get android if they do not like apple.

Interesting about the EQ feature. A long, long time ago, in an iPhone far, far away, the EQ for the old music settings used to work system wide. We're talking back in the days of like iOS 5 or 6 here.

Would be nice to have that back, to be honest. 🙂

Personal Voices can be used with VoiceOver on supported devices, but they sound extremely robotic and monotone from demos I've heard. I don't have compatible hardware, so I can't test this for myself. Hopefully Apple has something else like DECTalk in the works, but only time will tell.

Now my memory isn't always the greatest so I might have this wrong, but I thought when I installed the Envision Assistant app that I had to grant permission for it to use Apple voices. And certainly the lady Brits there were of the posh variety which is in keeping with Apple. So I was wondering if those ones were going to be made available in iOS 18 for VoiceOver. I guess not. Does anyone else remember that, though? I quite liked some of those voices, posh though they were.

I can't think of anything worse than hearing my annoying whiny voice telling me that Safari is not Responding. Think I'd rather use the novelty voices.

Maybe in a few years we’ll get eleven labs options or better for voiceover but it would be surprising if it happens this year. Having said that, I’m pretty sure the Siri voice in Apples WWDC keynote was better than whats currently available so I’m hoping for new Siri voices in iOS18 even though they aren’t there right now.

As a voice-over user in Apple's ecosystem, the one improvement I would love to see is a frequently updated dictionary. This enhancement is crucial for incorporating new words that are constantly being added and edited.

It is essential for the voice-over dictionary to keep pace with the ever-evolving nature of language. With the rapid development of technology and the creation of new terminology, having an up-to-date dictionary would significantly enhance the user experience. Ensuring that the dictionary is regularly refreshed would not only improve accuracy but also make it easier for users to understand and communicate effectively. Such a feature would greatly benefit those of us who rely on voice-over for our daily tasks, providing us with a seamless and efficient tool for all our linguistic needs.

Apologies if this has already been touched upon, but I would kill to see a toggle added to enable/disable the ability to use VOs abreviation dictionary. Seriously there is nothing more frustrating than trying to read an e-book, and suddenly you hear some nonsensical word where you know some random letters should be...

You can turn on or off the abbreviation dictionary for eloquence, and I’m afraid that’s the only voice you can do that with. There’s also a community dictionary for eloquence as well.

I know this can be done on Windows, and figured it was the same for mac/iOS, just wished it was more of a universal feature. 🤷

New English voices would be nice... Only time will tell. we are still in the first Beta.Apple could add new voices or improvements to existing voices at the last minute; just as they added new sounds to iOS 17. BTW Can apple ringtones such as seedling be used as text tones in iOS 18 or did that go out the window?

I just heard that if you created a personal voice you can use it in voiceover? Heard de demo of it. How is that working out?