Enhance Accessibility: Adding Voices to VoiceOver Rotor Voices on iOS

In this podcast, Thomas Domville reviews and demonstrates the Voices feature, which allows you to customize multiple VoiceOver voices to suit your needs. You can quickly access these voices using the Rotor Actions or the VoiceOver Quick Settings.

How to Add VoiceOver Voices to the Voices Feature on iOS

1. Open Settings: Start by opening the Settings app with a double tap on your iOS device.
2. Go to Accessibility: Scroll down and double tap on "Accessibility."
3. Select VoiceOver: Under the Vision section, double tap on "VoiceOver."
4. Tap on Speech: In the VoiceOver settings, double tap on "Speech."
5. Add a New Voice: double Tap on "Add Rotor Voice..." to see a list of available voices.
6. Choose a Voice: Browse through the list and select the voice you want to add. You can swipe up on a voice to hear a sample.
7. Download the Voice: After selecting a voice, double tap "Download" to add it to your device.
8. Set Up Rotor Actions: Go back to the VoiceOver settings and double tap on "Rotor." Ensure that "Voices" is selected so you can quickly switch between voices using the Rotor.
9. Quick Settings Access: You can also access the new voices through the VoiceOver Quick Settings by two finger quadruple tap and selecting "Voice."

Now, you can easily switch between your customized VoiceOver voices to enhance your accessibility experience on iOS 18.

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is generated by AIKO, an automated transcription service. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello and welcome.

My name is Thomas Domville, also known as Anonymouse.

I'm going to be talking about a feature called Voices.

So as you know, we have our primary voice over voice that we use each and every day on our device.

Wouldn't it be great that you are able to access various voices more than just one voice over on the fly?

Yep, you can do that.

It lives right in your rotor, if that's where you would like it to be.

In my case, I have it in my rotor itself.

You can also put that in the voice over quick settings if you wish to.

And I'll be showing you how to add that to your rotor and quick setting if that's something you want to do.

But in my case, whenever I do a podcast, you probably always hear that I use Siri number 4 voice, in short is Noel.

And this is what I use when I do podcasting, but every so often I like to change things up and here's some other voice and that would be Tom and Hans.

So those are my top two voices.

And so in order to access it so quickly and easily, I place the voices in within my rotor.

So let me give you an example of what it sounds like and what it looks like.

So I'm going to access my rotor and I'm going to go to Voices.

Voices, Siri voice 4, default, selected.

So if I swipe up, Tom, primary voice.

I have the Tom primary voice.

Or if I could just swipe up again, Siri voice 4, default.

I'm back to Siri voice number 4.

So this is when I'm talking about how you are able to access voices so easily from your rotor or your quick settings, if that's what you choose to do.

So let me show you how I got that set up.

But before we can do anything, we need to add voices so you can have more than just one voice.

The beautiful part about this is that you can have as many voices you want within the voices area.

And on top of that, if you are a native speaker of a different language, let's just say Spanish or French, for example, yes, you can mix up different languages with each other.

Different languages, different dialect, and the whole nine yards can all be in one single place under Voices.

Pretty cool, right?

So I'm going to head over to Settings here.

Settings double tap to open.

And let's begin our adventure to find this Voices feature.

So one finger, double tap that search search field, double tap to edit, and you are going to swipe to the right until you get to Accessibility.

And from here, do one finger, double tap once again.

Now swipe to the right until you get to VoiceOver.

One finger, double tap.

We're almost there.

So now swipe to the right until you find Speech.

And here at last, we are where we need to go.

So one finger, double tap to open up Speech.

As I always like to do, I like to start at the very top left.

So to do this, you can either just touch the top left hand corner or do a forefinger tap towards the top half of your device.

And that gives you an idea where the back button is.

So the back button is now at the top left.

And as you swipe to the right, you should hear the following items.

And right where we left off when we came into it is your primary voice.

This is your primary voice, and in my case is Tom Enhanced.

So if you go to the right here, and your voice might be different on here.

It could be Samantha, it could be any voices you have selected when you set up the voice over for the first time that that's your primary voice.

Now what we want to do is we want to add additional voices to this area.

Now in my case, I do have an additional voice, so it may sound a little different on here.

So if I swipe to the right, you're going to hear this item.

Additional Voices, Heading.

Now let's swipe to the right again.

Siri Voice 4, Default, English, United States, Button, Actions Available.

And that is why within my voices in the rotor, I saw those two voices listed.

That's because those two voices live here.

So now in your case, we want to add more voices, and in my case, I do too.

I want to add two more voices to this pile.

So go to the right here, Add Rotor Voice, Button.

That's where we want to go.

This is how you add additional rotor voices.

So I'm going to do one finger double tap, Done, Button.

You have the Done, Button, which is located at the top left-hand corner.

Now we are in Presented in the Language area.

So this is where you will need to define what language that you want to search or look for a voice within that language itself.

So as I swipe to the right, English is at the very top and that's exactly where I want to go.

So I'm going to double tap on English here.

Now I'm going to go to the top here.

So I'm going to do my four finger tap at the top half of the screen.

Well, you can go back to the language.

So English wasn't the one you really wanted, you could just double tap that and go back to the right language that you needed or wanted to go into to do for those voices.

Now as I go to the right.

I get to Personal Voice.

Now in your case, you probably don't have this.

This is an additional feature, a totally separate feature called Personal Voice, which you can create or duplicate your voice as a voice over voice.

It's kind of cool.

It's a long process to set up.

It's not always ideal that sounds like you, but it has some similarities to it.

So in my case, I have done this and I created this, but this is for a whole different topics and different day how that's done.

But nonetheless, if you do have a personal voice, yes, you can use it as a voice over voice.

So if I swipe to the right here, so if you have one, sure enough, you can just do one finger double tap and go in the process of using that voice.

But in this case, I don't want to do that.

I'm going to go to the right one more time.

So here's a dialect for the United States.

So we have all the various ones.

We have Australia, we have UK, we have India, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm going to go down to Siri.

I'm going to do a different variation of Siri voice number four, and I'll explain what I mean by that and how that's different than what you're hearing now.

So I'm going to go by headings here, otherwise if you just swipe to the right, you'll see all the various voices that you can download.

And of course, if those are the voices that you want, you just do one finger double tap and download those voices and that will be the voice that you will use for under voices.

And of course, if you swipe down on this, you can always have a speak example or sample of that particular voice if you don't know that function is there.

All right.

So I'm going to go back down to Siri.

I'm going to go to the right now and find Siri voice number four.

Now notice that this voice doesn't say download.

That's because it's been downloaded.

So if it needs to download, that's when you go back up and double tap on the voice and it'll start proceeding the download process.

Now this voice has already been downloaded as I'm using that right now for the podcast.

But anywho, I do want to use this particular voice.

So I'm going to double tap on this.

All right.

So now we are presented to a new page here.

This is where you can make configuration and tweaks to the voice itself and also show you a bonus or two while we're on this page.

Now as I swipe to the right, now you notice it says two.

That's because the previous Siri voice is already in there.

So it's duplicating.

So this is the second version of that Siri voice number four.

I'll be going back to that later to show you how to rename that because we will be doing that.

So let's go to the right and see what else we have on this page.

You always have the option to play just to make sure that sounds exactly what you have set up.

So right now by default it's going to sound just like this Siri that you're hearing now.

Rate, heading, decrease speed, image, slider 50%, adjustable, swipe up or down with one finger to adjust the value.

Now the cool thing about this is that for each voice that you create for voices, each of those can be assigned to a different speech rate, which is absolutely fantastic.

Because I typically have my tom enhance at 60%, but for the podcast, for the Siri number four voice, I typically have that at 50% just to slow things down to make it a little more understandable.

But nonetheless, if I want to change this, and I am, I'm going to go to 55%.

I'm going to swipe up here.

Hi, I'm Siri.

Now you get to hear that voice at that speed.

So you got to hear.

So every time you change the rate, you get to hear what that rate sounds like.

So that kind of gives you an idea if it's too fast or too slow for your liking.

And once that's set, every time I change the voice within Rotor, it's already set to that speech rate that I assigned to that particular voice.

Increase speed, image, as I swipe to the right, pitch, heading.

We have all these variations that you could probably just tweak on your own time just to make it like to try and experiment and try to change the voice up.

I'm not going to be experimenting all that much with this demonstration, but just to show you that these items do exist.

So pitch is an item, volume, heading, volume is an option.

So if one voice sounds a little louder than the other, yep, it can happen.

I noticed that Tom is a little louder than the Siri for what a reason that might be.

So if you do, and if that kind of bugs you, you don't have to keep hitting the volume button down, you can select that volume sound level for that voice itself.

So I might decrease Tom by 10% and put it at 90%, otherwise it's always at the standard 100%.

Voice presets, heading.

Now this is exclusive, just to Siri voices only.

No, this is not the Siri that you use to initiate or on the side button.

This is the Siri voice that I use for voiceover.

And this is the only place that you'll see these presets.

There's five presets for changing up how Siri sounds, which is kind of a cool deal.

So let me show you what those five items are.

So if I swipe to the right, selected default button, you hear the default itself.

So that's the one that's used now.

What are the other four items?

Let's go to the right and find out.

Even inflection button.

If you're curious and what that sounds like, if you double tap that, you're going to hear a little bit of coming overlapping.

You'll hear the default Siri talking and then you're going to hear the even inflection Siri talking.

So double tap that.

You'll hear two different voices.

Hi, I'm Siri.

Even inflection.

It gives you an idea of what that sounds like.

Faster pace button.

If you want a faster one, double tap that one.

Hi, I'm Siri.

Faster pace.

Wow.

How much quicker that is, right?

So if that's something that you like, and my gosh, it's still at speech rate number 50.

I can't imagine what that sounds like 100%.

I know some of you like them really high speech rate.

I am not one of those.

I just can't simply understand it, but nonetheless, you're able to speed up.

So there's two more presets you can select from.

Let's go to the right.

Even inflection and faster pace.

I've got the even and faster, so double tap that.

Hi, I'm Siri.

Even inflection and faster pace.

The next one is the one I'm going for.

Narration button.

I like the narration for certain conditions.

So in this case, I'm going to double tap this.

Hi, I'm Siri.

Narration.

Now, I've selected narration and I set it to 55% speech rate.

It's great.

It's perfect.

And those are your presets.

Now let's go to the right.

One more area for you to explore.

Voice presets change the overall speaking style of a voice.

They can be further customized with specific voice settings.

Audio effects.

Heading.

Well, we have audio effects.

Now the presets, remember, is only for Siri, but all other voices will have this audio effect.

What is this?

Now if you go to the right here.

Equalizer.

Button.

You got something called the equalizer.

Yep.

You are able to change the range of the equalizer.

You got the low, you got the mid, and you got the high band frequency that you can adjust to tweak that voice to your liking.

Maybe you can hear some of the higher end frequency.

You might want to lower that high frequency down a little bit and so thus you can hear it a little better yourself.

The best part, you can tweak it to your heart content.

Now if you feel like you got to the point where, oh man, I got this all messed up, no worries.

As we swipe to the right.

Reset voice settings.

Button.

We got the reset voice settings.

Reverts all voice changes to defaults.

Exactly.

And you just double tap on that reset and voila, you're back to where the defaults.

So this is where you can have fun and play around with all the different tweaks that you can do to the voice.

Now before I head out of here, I mentioned about renaming this particular voice.

I want to do that.

So I'm going to go back to the very top.

So four finger tap towards the top half of my device.

Speech.

Back button.

Where you have the back button.

Now you should remember if you go to the right.

Siri voice four two.

Button.

Where we have Siri voice two.

Well, double tap that.

Rename button.

Now you're presenting with a rename button.

So let's go ahead and do that.

One finger, double tap.

Text field is editing pitch heading.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove the number two and put in my own customized name to it.

So I'm going to do that.

Now I'm going to hit the delete button here.

Delete right paren delete to put in the narration word narration.

Put the right princesses back in.

Numbers left paren right paren right paren narration.

Voila.

That's exactly what I want.

Now I'm going to find the done button, which is towards the bottom right hand corner.

Done.

Double tap that.

Done.

Audio effects.

Heading.

All right.

Now let's go to the top here.

Voice over.

Back button.

Which is at the top left hand corner.

Now if I swipe to the right now until I get to my primary voice.

Pitch heading edit button.

Primary voice heading Tom enhanced English United States button.

Now she swiped right.

You should now have additional voices available to you.

Additional voices heading Siri voice for default English United States button actions available.

That's the one I had originally.

If you recall, I actually put the default word in there.

Siri voice for narration English United States button actions available.

Voila.

Now it is listed.

Now anytime you want to remove the voices, there is a simple it's going to the voice itself and do a swipe up.

Delete where you have the option to delete it.

One finger double tap and that will remove the voice itself.

Now the kind of a weird thing to show you or tell you about.

You can't really change that voice.

So if I would go back into the Siri voice number for narration, it gives you the setup.

There's no way to change that voice to a different voice.

So you have to delete it and then you have to go back to the screen and add a new rotor voice.

It's kind of a weird thing, but it's just something for you to know.

I'm going to add one more voice here.

Add rotor voice button.

Double tap this done button.

Now you recall this is our languages, so I'm going to swipe to the right until I get to the English language heading English button.

One finger double tap on that English language back button and one would do is I'm gonna go by headings until I find English Australia because I'm looking for Karen English heading personal voice heading English United States heading eloquence button heading collapsed Siri button heading expanded English Australia heading and last I'm here so I'm gonna swipe to the right Karen button actions available.

Now notice that there are going to be different variety of the Karen voices.

This will depend on the voice over voice themselves.

If you just hear the name itself, that means they're compact version.

So it's not the best quality, but it is the smallest size and probably a little quicker when it comes to actual voice over voice when it comes to speech rate and things like that.

But nonetheless, that one is already downloaded because it's compact.

What I'm looking for is premium.

So I'm gonna go to the right here, download Karen enhanced 157.3 MB button Karen premium using 213.5 MB button actions available.

Now once again, that one doesn't say download it because I've already downloaded.

So if you haven't downloaded, just double tap on the voice and I'll go through the download process.

Once it's done, you might have to double tap on that again.

Otherwise, it should take you to the screen where you can set up and tweak the voice itself.

So I'm gonna go ahead and add Karen here, Karen speech back button.

Alright, so this is a similar screen where we had all the variation where you could rename the voice and things like that.

So I'm going to just go directly down to the speech rate and I'm going to change that rate heading decrease speed image slider 50% adjustable swipe up or down with one finger to adjust the value.

I'm going to set to 55% 55% and my name is Karen.

That's about right for me.

I like that a 55% so perfect.

I don't really need to make any other tweaks and remember the preset is only for serious so it's not existing but the audio effects it is and you got your pitch and you got your volume so you can make those changes if you want.

Now go to the back top left hand button again, speech back button, double tap that speech back button.

Now we should have already added that.

So let's go to the right here and see what voices we have here to finalize this list of voices that I have for myself.

Speech heading edit button primary voice Tom enhanced English United States button additional voices heading Siri voice for default English United States button Siri voice for narration English United States button Karen premium English Australia button actions available.

Awesome.

So we're now ready with that.

Now before we head out of here completely, I want you to go back up just one more screen here so we can get this set up in your rotor.

So let's go to the top left hand corner here voice over back button, double tap that voice over back button.

Now we should be in the same main screen of voiceover accessibility area.

That's where we found the speech button.

So I'm going to go to the right here until I find rotor rotor button and when you find the rotor button, one finger double tap rotor items button and one more time we want to go to the rotor items selected characters actions available.

So what we're looking here, these are all the items that you want to appear within your rotor.

So anything that's selected is there in the rotor.

You can deselect things to D kind of declutter your rotor.

I've done this a couple of times and you're probably not a bad idea for you to do that.

However, in this podcast, we're going to keep focus on the voices.

You can go to the right until you find voices.

It is going to be quite a bit way down there.

Of course you can start at the bottom if you want four finger tap at the bottom half and go left until you find voices selected voices actions available and at last you're finally there.

That was a lot of swiping.

Wasn't it?

Now in my case, I've already got this selected.

So if yours is not selected, go ahead and do a one finger double tap until it says is selected.

Now that you have that selected, you can now access it via rotor.

Now for those that don't like to clutter up your rotor, that's perfectly fine.

You can do the same thing within quick settings.

Quick settings allow you to access rather than using the rotor by doing a two finger quadruple tap on the screen and that allows you quickly go to quick settings, very similar to rotor, but in just a wee bit different, I'll show you that in a moment.

If you want to set that up in quick settings, let's go back to the top left hand corner, double tap on that.

Once more, we need to go to the top left, double tap that.

And then we're back to the root of voiceover accessibility page.

Now what we're looking for a quick setting.

So swipe to the right until you find quick settings, quick settings button.

If you prefer this method, go ahead and do one finger, double tap activities actions available.

Now these are the lists of items that you can add to your quick settings.

Now obviously you can declutter this as well, whatever you want to set up, very similar to what we just gone through the process of the rotor, select what you want, deselect that you don't want, but the main point here is go ahead and swipe to the right until you find voices, selected voice actions available.

There's voice, go ahead and double tap that to select it.

If that's what you want to use for quick setting instead, once it's selected, we are ready.

So let's go back out of here and go back to my home screen here, settings active, swipe up with three fingers to close the app, swipe up or down to select a custom action, then double tap to activate.

All right, so drum roll please, now you can access your rotor.

So go ahead and access your rotor until you find voices.

Voices, Siri voice four, default, selected, excellent.

So let's see if all the voices made it on here.

So I'm going to swipe down, Siri voice for narration, beautiful.

There's narration, let's swipe down, Karen, awesome.

There's Karen, Tom primary voice, then I'm back around to Tom and then I'll go back to my Siri handy dandy Siri number four.

Siri voice four, default.

Awesome.

And you now know that's the one for the default, not the narration.

So that's how you can access through all the different rotors.

Now for those that want to keep an eye on the rotors, yes, I mentioned the quick settings.

Now you have set that up as an optional, as I mentioned before, I'm going to go ahead and do a two finger quadruple tap here.

Voice over settings, heading, now you've got the voice over settings.

Now I know my voice is at the very bottom, so I'll go to the bottom here.

Voice, Siri voice four, default, button, adjustable.

And this works just like we were in rotors.

Now if you swipe up, Siri voice for narration, Karen English, Australia, Tom English, US, Siri voice four, default.

Awesome.

So now you know how to add, remove, modify voices, and then add them within your rotor or your quick settings.

So that way you'd be able to access the voice that you are in the mood for in that moment.

So as I read different type of articles in my Safari, I typically will use my Siri voice number four, narration.

And every so often I just want something different than Tom and Hans, I'll use Karen voice, which is very soothing as well, easy to understand.

So I hope this was useful to you.

And my name is Thomas Domville, also known as Anonymouse.

Till next time.

Bye-bye.