VoiceOver speaking rate

My is at 55. Alicia your number is to high and probably difficult to understand. 50 to slow and the perfect number is 55. Long live cats.

I never put my speaking right past 50% of my brain can’t processing anything faster.

These days I primarily use default Samantha on my iPhone. She is currently at 65%, though I have hacker at 70% before. The rare times I use eloquence on iOS, I crank that up pretty high. Somewhere between 80 and 90. Though to be fair I do not use eloquence on my iPhone very often. I mainly will use that on my laptop, and only when I am dealing with source code. Other times I also have Samantha high premium or high-quality or whatever it's called on my PC laptop. Don't remember exactly what the number is, but it's equivalent to 65 on my iPhone.

Hi,
I'm a huge fan of Eloquence. My favorite voice is Reed & I have him at a speaking rate of 70%, which is perfect for me.

Me too. I like using Reed, sinse I'm used to hearing it on JAWS. I have it set to 80% and I have the Rate Multiplier set to 115%. I'm the only one that understands what is saying.

One thing to know about this is that if I use VoiceOver at a faster rate, is that it drains my battery.

The vocalizer voices on the PC or premium high or compact. That’s interesting that there’s somebody on here who has a bad drainage when the speaking rate is faster. Maybe it takes more battery power to make it speak faster? I’m not really sure why that would be. But that’s interesting.

When using Alex, I prefer speech rate at about 65%, 70 at the highest. Using the eloquence, reed voice, I like it at about 75%.

Technically, 50%, more practically, 900wpm, since espeak has its own rate controls in the app. For reference, that's about equivalent to espeak on nvda with rateboost on and a rate of 75.

Samantha, 85

Watch, iPad and phone 55. Voice Tom. Long live gatas.

On my devices, I've set it about 60%.

I have Daniel advanced at 100%. Whenever I've experimented with eloquence, I've managed to get it to 85 - 90% before I couldn't understand it.
I'm not a massive fan of eloquence though really because I prefer the voice to be somewhat expressive and eloquence gets on my nerves quickly.
This is, of course, a matter of preference.

In my phone for mail, have Alison, music eva, kindle, Daniel, and message had samantha. Deleted Sam in message because got 2 voices, Sam and Tom. Long live cats.

As a teacher of the Visually Impaired, I would sneak in and increase student's rate. I felt it would make them more productive in the long run.

Glad you were never my teacher. My hearing and ability to listen affect my ability to understand. Unless you did it with my consentthat would be different. Long live cats.

I use Samantha at 100% and have done so for many years, probably since junior high if not earlier. For Eloquence Reed, I can understand it well at 85%. When I’m using eSpeak, mostly on NVDA and on Linux, I set it to 900 words per minute and I can understand it. If I am converting books to audio I would use 600 because it is hard to listen to articles and books at 900. A long time ago I just increased the speech rate gradually over time until it became hard to understand or reached the maximum, and whenever I start using a new TTS I do the same. It seems like eSpeak can be understood the fastest, followed by synthesizers like eloquence and TGSpeechBox (which has been getting better in this regard), followed by natural voices like Vocalizer and Microsoft’s new natural voices.

I love these kinds of personal preference questions. I have tried to increase the speaking rate of voices and it’s just something that I physically get in pain doing. I’ve literally gotten headaches trying to process of way faster so I just keep everything at 50% Samantha enhance on my iPhone SE and Karen premium on my iPhone 15 and I’ve even used Karen enhance on the iPhone 15 sometimes and regular Karen but I still have to keep both of them at 50% as well. I’ve also switched to regular Samantha on my iPhone SE sometimes but I still have to keep her at 50% as well. Does it matter how long I’ve been using synthesize speech which for me has been all my life as I’ve been totally blind since birth I still was never able to listen to fast speech. Even when I used to have a computer with the keynote gold Voice and I used to have a bro like 2000 I could never put the speaking right up really high for that either. I would never want the voice from the barrel light back though that one’s awful. Everybody has different ways their brains can process information so I think that’s why there’s so many different options for speaking rates. Has anybody ever played around with the pitch in the timber of the voices? I don’t really do that anymore because it seems like the higher quality versions of the voices such as either the enhanced or premium don’t really do well when you change the pictures. It’s like they can’t handle it. There’s almost like a distortion that happens. So I just keep everything at their default speaking right in pitch in timber. I played around debate with the timber sometimes, but then I just reset everything to default.

I have mine at 60% I found as the subject field states that if I go to fast I find myself trying to breathe for the voice. Like come on take a breath before you collapse lol.

On my phone, I have Eloquence set at 70 and that for me is a nice balance. Vocalizer Tom Enhanced on my Watch is set to 60. When I use Alex, it is set to 60 as well. I have to go lower if I use the Siri voices as to me anyway, they sound choppy at higher speaking rates.

I think all the higher quality voices don’t really do well at fast speaking rates. It seems to be the same thing for their pictures as well. If you try to change, it gets like more distorted or something. It seems like the regular voices can handle that kind of thing better speaking right and it changes. Does anybody play around with their pitch change or timber? I keep my picture of my voices of the default for 50% and they also keep the timber at the default 100. I’ve played with it when the Settings first became available, but I didn’t really stick with different ones.

I thought my Mac was slower than my phone but apparently I have it set to 80 and my phone to 78.

I thought my watch was fastest - it shows a rate of 78 until I select a voice then it shows 85 which is what I expected. So not sure there.

The voice makes a difference - if it's eloquence then I'm going to be dropping it down a lot.

I find the speed on my watch is good except when a notification comes in and then I might struggle to hear it. But I have it fast mainly to try to practice with it.

Usually my Mac is fine but sometimes it is too fast - particularly if trying to read something complicated. In those cases I will use an activity which changes voices to Siri and sets the rate to 60.

I took a good long time getting as fast as this and think I'm about as far as I can and need to go. When first using a screen reader I felt a weird bit of pressure to go as fast as possible, as if I wasn't any good unless I was using Eloquence at 100 speed. Actually threads like this make me feel better. Using whatever rate is most comfortable for you isn't a bad thing.