an observation about VoiceOver voices

Your observation is totally correct. Yeah Sandy is the one in VoiceOver that sounds like Bobby and Jaws. And yeah, you do have to do something to adjust the breathing on that cause it sounds horrible otherwise. And then the flow voice does sound like Sandy and Jaws. They renamed some of them. The other one is that the Eddie Voice and Voice is actually Glenn and Jaws. I have no idea why they did this but it’s one of those things that I’m guessing maybe they had to do that in order to license eloquence to that Apple products. I’m not 100% sure I’m just guessing.

Same here. I use eloquence, and have stucked with Red as my default. you can make it sound more human by raising the pitch range to 100. If you leave it at its default, it will sound like a monotone robot. Yes, Sandy you have to adjust the breathiness and as with Eddie it is the Glenn voice in jaws.

I always found a pitch range option a little bit weird. I’m so used to the main inflection. The eloquence always had so when you change it to a higher level of inflection, it just makes eloquent sound very often somehow. I don’t really know how to describe it, but I just sounds definitely not. I’m used to. I ended up stopping using eloquence on my devices because they were so much quieter than the regular voices that are normally an iPhone such as a vocalizer voice. So for now I’m using Samantha enhanced on my iPhone SE 2022 and I’m using Karen premium on my iPhone 15. I may go back to eloquence if they can do anything about the quality of the voices, but even on my computer with Jaws, I don’t use anymore. I use the vocalizer voices. But if that works for people to switch the picture and I may try that and see if I like it. Yeah you definitely have to adjust the breath to zero to get it to sound like how Bobby sounds and jaws for Sandy. And the weird thing is now there’s some kind of bug where those studies stay if you get out of synthesize or you go back to it. It will go back towards default, even if you’ve saved those settings.

OK, I’ll have to try again. I have an iPhone 15 and an iPhone SE 2022 and they’re both running iOS 26.5. My favorite eloquence voice is Bobby if it’s Jaws Sandy if it’s and then Glenn if it’s Jaws and if it’s and then flows voiceover and Sandy jaws. Yeah those are the eloquence I like. I will have to try that. Thanks for the heads up.

I’m using eloquent Eddie British variant right now and you’re right. The volume is definitely improved for sure. This is on my iPhone SE 2022. It kind of sounds nice. I think I’ll leave it on this for a while. See how I like it.

Interesting discussion here: I've always used the Reed voice. I do agree though that the Eloquence voices are way quieter than the vocalizer ones. i do wish they could do something to make the higher sample rate sound better. To be fair though, I don't know if that's even an option in JAWS.

A couple years ago I connected my AirPods Pro to my computer at work using JAWS and Eloquence sounded exactly the same as on my phone. It was kinda trippy realizing that my work computer and my only personal device, the phone in my hand, sounded exactly alike.

I used to have quite elaborate sound schemes set up in JAWS back when I used it all the time, and I used to get flack for it. All in good fun of course. I would love to have that on my iPhone if Apple would let you tweak settings that much.

I went back to the vocalizer voices. The volume of eloquence is definitely a bit better than it used to be, but I just can’t get used to those voices coming out of my phone. They’ve always come out of computers since I have like 10 years old when I first started using jaws so now it’s really weird hearing it coming out of the phone. I’m just not used to that so I’m sticking with premium Karen and both of my devices for voiceover and British one for Siri.

As far as I can remember when iOS 16 introduced Eloquence, they sounded completely different than now and also when selecting flo it was much faster than the other variants. Also in the early betas we once had again a different version that sounded completely downsampled and even rouined the phone speaker of a friend.