Why do you choose a device voice?

I could give a bunch of excuses as to why I choose the voices that I choose. In the end, however, it all boils down to what I can stand to listen to for a long period of time reading through a document. Such as reading an e-book, for instance.
Some speech engines give me mental fatigue—looking at you Eloquence—so I don't use them very often, if at all.
Currently on my Windows 11 PC I use Samantha (premium high), and on my iPhone I use Samantha (standard). That voice works well enough for my needs, and doesn't wipe me out as much as some of the other speech options out there.

Well, some of my choices for voices are my friends. Karen and Samantha I totally pretend to my friends. They’re definitely the voices I can tolerate using for the longest amount of reading time. There are definitely voices that will give me a literal headache. That’s eloquent for me. Yes, I grew up with it, but I still get headaches from it. You know, but then it was a little harder to do something about it, but I think even then I was getting a headache from it. Other times his voice is I just like to try out for a little while and see if I like them. I have all of the voices downloaded to both of my phones that are in English so I really just gotta get to play around with all of them. I even have the E voices in the TV side voices. So I just kind of play around a lot of of them. I play around with Alex every once in a while. And I guess the only other thing probably would just be like all of the ones that I play with once in a while. But it’s mainly Karen and it’s Samantha for me. Oh and superstar because I just think superstar super cute. I don’t know why she’s considered a novelty voice because she’s literally a irregular Apple voice. I am kind of happy that she’s preinstalled though. And as far as with Karen Samantha, I can really read with either variant. I prefer Samantha enhanced, but I will use the regular Samantha sometimes too. And for caring I definitely use either regular Karen or the premium high Karen. The enhanced Karen seems to have some really weird distortion or compression issues or something like that but I will still use her every once in a while just because she’s Karen. I really wish that we could get a premium Samantha for the phone at some point. Cause trust me, those premium high voices. The computers are totally different than the premium invoices that we get for the phone. I don’t know if the phones just don’t have the processing power for them, but they are definitely a higher quality on a computer with the premium aversions of any of the premium ones. Cornhouse ones are right now. Oh I forgot I also like to use Kait enhanced the vocalizer Kait not the Bruno TTS Kait. I don’t actually have that synthesizer installed. But you had a great topic. I definitely I’m curious to see what other people have to say about this.

I’ve always preferred female voices or child voices. I loved Bobby. Bobby got me through all in writing on my college papers when I was in college. I’ve had singing training too. Yes, there’s definitely a difference between a full voice and a female voice, but you already knew that. Yeah like I said earlier I definitely do pretend that Karen and Samantha are my friends and that they’re friends with each other. I’ve literally made a game out of this. The male voices like a kind of tolerate growing up in this in the sizes was like Glenn and then that was like really it because the other voices I ever used in eloquence was Bobby or Sandy but this was the old version like back in the jaws like 3.3 days back in 1998. I actually missed the old version of Sandy. It was like a softer quality not more calm. I don’t like the one I have now. But yeah, I’m definitely not a fan of the old pitch. Shifting voices for sure. I definitely don’t like anything super dramatic either. I don’t like anything robotic really. I still have the voice. It’s just in case I want to use them for example like agony and Vicky and Victoria Bruce stuff like that once in a while generally I don’t. Agnes. Like as soon as those voices became available for iOS, I went and got them just because I never had them before. I’ve used Cathy and Junior just like that too.

Well for me I've always used Samantha on the phone ever since I got my first iPhone in 2014. Tried dozens of others and always go back to her and not the enhanced version as that sound bad to me. However, on the laptop it's JAWS and I never use anything else. Tried downloading the Samantha version which should in theory work but can't be doing with it. So Robot on laptop and Samantha on phone. I have no idea deep down why though.

I switch the voice on my device from time to time, but I seem to always go back to Eloquence. It's the voice I grew up with. I've been hearing it ever since I learned to use a computer over 20 years ago. It's hard to use anything else. I also like the inflection when it reads.

I think a lot of times voices can be preferred older ones because hearing your preferred synthesize your voice from a phone and then hearing it from a laptop it’s a totally different experience. They’re coming from a lot different kinds of speakers the end of the day. Did you get the premium high voices in jaws for the vocalizer voices maybe why you didn’t like Samantha? Because you can’t get the compact voices. It comes in a package called the compact English Voice collection. You get that by going to the freedom scientific website there’s literally a link within the downloads sizes and then one of the choices of the compact English Voice collection. If you download that it will give you all of the vocalizer voices and compact form and Samantha is one of those. If you want to try that you might like it. It sounds a lot like the phone Samantha that comes pre-installed and iOS with all the Apple products. I said it’s almost the same is because it’s like I said it’s coming from a different kind of speaker but other than that it is the same quality is the one that stuck Samantha on the phone. I definitely see Elaine about enhanced Samantha. She definitely took some getting used to me too. It’s not a smooth and clean necessarily as regular Samantha, but I get used to it and kept looking it better but everybody’s got their own preferences.

I lost my eyesight in late 2009. Did not get my first smartphone until March or April 2010, a crappy little android device called an LG Optimus, from MetroPCS.
It had a very rudimentary version of TalkBack, and the speech synthesizer was pico TTS. This was pretty much my introduction to screen reading technology.

Of course things got better, I learned about SBOX, which was a much, much better speech synthesizer for TalkVack, back then. In July 2012, I got my first iPhone, an iPhone 4s.

I don't care what anybody says, Samantha on that device was the best version of Samantha for iOS.
Ever.

Unfortunately, I’ve never had an iPhone with that version of Samantha, but I did get a chance to hear a demo of it. Their YouTube video and yeah, it was pretty darn awesome. Yeah she’s totally not the same anymore. I wish there was like a I don’t know iPhone hack or something that would allow you to run the older voices for iOS. That would be pretty awesome. I mean, you like the older versions of the vocalizer voices or something. Luckily all kind of went downhill when I was 16 we know that. But yeah, I just seen it from the things that I’ve noticed for sure like every once in a while. I used to use Tom and he definitely went downhill that iOS 16 and hasn’t been right since same thing with like Allison and Ava and stuff like there’s just a lot more distortion and crap going on with the voiceover voices right now. In in Jaws, like I said, the premium high versions of localizer are so much better than what we get in the phones. I mean, there’s just like a 90 day difference if you put them right next to each other you would be able to tell exactly. But yes, Samantha in iPhone four days was totally better. And I love Samantha now, but yeah, definitely definitely different done for sure a lot better. Yeah they’re really needs to be a way to run the older vocalizer voices on current iOS. I wish. At least iOS 27 is giving us access to the older voices not getting names now besides Nikki so I’m happy about that. I can’t wait to get those once. I update the 27. I’m definitely gonna get Gordon and Catherine and Arthur and Martha in both variants for all of them.

I've been hearing Mac voices since the early 90s until I had Eloquence inflicted upon me in the 2000s, so I have a base for comparison.
I drive Alex daily on my mac and iPhone because I find it is the most robust in terms of parsing speech, pronunciation and getting little things right like numbers and punctuation when I use them. What I love about Alex is its scalability in terms of small speakers to wearing studio headphones. It has just enough balance across frequencies to sound pleasant and bearable for extended periods of time, especially when listening on a full range speaker or airPods.
Apple specifically designed this voice to be understandable at high rates of speed and pleasant ot listen to for slower speech rates.

Samantha comes in a close second and is my workhorse for my work laptop. It is not only responsive and understandable, it helps me clearly distinguish between work and home laptops. This is especially important as I use a keyboard that switches between multiple devices and I don't want to accidentally type home stuff on the work computer.

I find some of the other third party voices a bit campy and some of them can be a bit unresponsive. I do like Siri Voice 4 for its clarity, but it can't cut it when it comes to being a reliable and responsive voice for text editing and daily navigation work.

Eloquence is a nonstarter for me as I find the voices quite harsh to listen to somewhere in the midrange. My ears hurt after listening to Eloquence with headphones after reading a long document and I think this is why. I don't get this with Alex.

I'm writing this comment while trying out some of the other voices and I can definitely get a sense that some of the other voices like Allison, Zoe and Evan sound quite dated in the way they pronounce things like "actions available" or pause for commas and dashes.

Eloquence was the first sinthasized voice I had ever herd. so when, in 2009, I starting macos, Eloquence was not an option. it took me a long time to get used to Alex, and for longform reading, I use Alex. Espeak isn't bad at times, ToBeSaid Pro, i use a lot to design AI voices, I use my own personal voice, which I have ben meening to rerecord, Seroprock voices are not all they're crack up to be, as they make the phone very slow, heat up, and make ios unusible, Zero TTS, seems good, Speachbox seems like espeak a bit, and it's cool to switch between voices for different tasks.

Who thinks this would be a really cool idea on iPhones. Like yes we can use different voices in different activities to read things to us but if you could have like say one voice be your incoming calls voice and then you know one voice that could read your text messages emails so on. I just think that’ll be really cool. I could have a different voice based on what kind of notification you were getting. I know right now there’s not a currently a way to do that but I think it would be pretty awesome. Yeah I am definitely in the camper preferring female voices and little kid voices. I just like to be able to have access to all of them, so I download all of them and I will every once in a while while use some guy voices and it’s good to have those options available if I want them. So if I were going to use any of the male voices I like Tom enhanced, Oliver enhanced, and Jamie hamster premium and I have used regular Jamie a couple of times. I guess Lee is OK too. But that would be in a premium form which incidentally is only available in my iPhone 15 and not my SE. Does anybody know like why that is? I literally have every voice in my iPhone SE is available with my 15 except for the Zoe premium Voice and the Lee premium Voice are only in the iPhone 15. I don’t know why this is this is something I have literally showed to Apple on my devices and they’ve literally run into the same issues with the devices that they were testing to and they really don’t know why that is so what I’m guessing is there was some kind of a hardware limitation but I really don’t know. Because when we first had iOS 16 available Zoe premium wasn’t in iPhone until I was 17 I think but then got removed really quickly after. Same thing they premium. There was supposedly a problem on those devices, but I kind of don’t buy that. They have literally everything else they have you know Karen, premium and Matilda premium, and all the other premium voices except for those two. So yeah, I like a lot of of them different voices. I think like people said before it kinda does depend on what to ask you’re doing cause I like Matilda en Hanson premium too even though I’ve used I downloaded all of them like I said. I really like Kait invariance died vocalizer Kait not the Bruna TTS. Oh and I kind of like some of the voices as Siri, but yeah, they definitely have issues navigating with VoiceOver. I don’t know why, but there’s definitely something that happens differently. Once you start trying to use a voice of voiceover. It’s like the whole quality just kind of falls apart and Their smoothness inability to flow while reading the text is just really not great with voiceover. If I were going to use a Voice with voiceover would be American Voice five or the British Voice one. Those kind of seemed to be the most responsive with voiceover at the moment. But yeah, US four is pretty awesome. Just not great with voiceover unfortunately. And you guys said that Voice five kind of sounds like a teenager guy dies. It does sound like a teenage boy. But yeah, they’re supposed to be like the gender neutral voice but yeah I totally does sound like that to me too. I wonder who actually recorded it? Look I already know Apple won’t tell us, but we do know that at least that Voice was created by human. I don’t know about any of the other ones, but I know that one was. There was an article when that Voice first became available that somebody from the LGBTQ community had recorded that Voice. It’s pretty cool. I don’t know if any of the other voices are recorded by humans but I know when I first got my iPhone 8 back and like I was 13 all the voices at that time where computer generated voices that was something that Apple told me they said it was everything from like iOS 10 up where all over that voices were computer generated. I don’t know if anybody else has an info about that since then but that’s basically what I was told. Still really looking forward to the new Voice is coming to iOS 27. Well, you know the new the new older voices I guess but yeah I’m looking forward to those coming. OK sorry for the long ramble. I’m getting off now.

Whether it's my iPhone or my TimeVocalist on the nightstand, I switch voices to keep things interesting. On the alarm clock, I even switch languages to keep my brain on its toes. I don't stick to defaults let alone just one voice. :)

Unrelated, but I am indian, sikh, do kirtan and have a broad interest in music in general, read way too much stuff about the technicality of opera voices and such.. I love your message!! 😂
Seriously, I started with eloquence and jaws because this is what RAMQ here in quebec feed us with. Then I discovered and loved espeak because it was new, everyone around me hsemed to hate it, and I always love new shiny things. Then I seriously used espeak for everything. When I switch to english, and still to this day, I can't hear 1s of eloquence in english us or uk, so I needed an English voice. Somebody recommended me alison and I love this voice. Then after code factory for nvda became abandonware I switched back to espeak. Before until this point, I was never able to read long form literature with espeak even if it's still the only group of voices that manage exclamation marks properly aside eloquence itself, like this!
Now even if I know ibmtts, and nobody should pay again for a 40 years old abandonware where the only payment we make is for the lawyers too busy to remove the conditions as these things never got real updates in ages, true for nuance voices as well... Now on windows with nvda as it's the only thing to implement the true real version of espeak properly I am with espeak None voice for everything, french, english and even the bits of punjabi it's decent at, technical, academic and everything else reading.
Before ios 12, one siri voice in french france was very, very good. Now the only trace of this voice, with voiceover at least,is in the sample voice, Idk what apple did to the siri voices but they got a new engine or something but only for voiceover and it's infuratingly such an inferior quality tts we have now.
And I don't care at all about the shiny new neural voices, online or offline.

I feel like it depends on what I am reading. Generally, I like male voices for academic reading, female voices for fiction reading. I am not stereotyping or anything, it is just my ears and brain. Eloquence is not a favourite voice for me for any context.

Speed is king, it makes you so efficient it's crazy. I've been using espeak for about a year now and I can say it's changed my life, no question. Availability is another factor as well as I don't want to be forced to learn more than one voice, if possible, just to reduce mental load and decrease adaption time.

Everybody prefers whatever they prefer. In the thing for me honestly, and I don’t know if it’s because I grew up with computerized voices is that all these more natural sounding voices that are supposed to be more human are the ones that I will actually gravitate towards a lot less. I don’t like them. They’re just too natural for me. I want my machine to sound like a machine. I don’t want to get to the point where my voices are so in distinguishable from an actual human voice that I wouldn’t know if I was hearing my phone talking to me or another human. I know, I really don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Some of these more naturalized AI voices are getting to beat for me at least just two human sounding. It’s the reason that I don’t like the voices in 11 labs reader or anything like that. And it’s also the other reason I am very happy that my phones will not be able to receive the new more expressive AI voices. So I’m actually thinking that because I said to me it would just get too confusing. So I was thrilled when I found out I wasn’t getting those voices. I think Voice is just much as a personal preference is like you know a flavor of soda or food or anything like that I mean these things are our screams and we have to use them all day long so we have to like them if the Voice is going to make something not feel pleasant for you then you’re going to have to switch to something that does. So yeah. I actually do like a lot of the vocalizer voices but they definitely kind of got mixed up and iOS 16. Like Alison enhanced is so distorted now. Her sample sounds fine but then when he goes selector is the Voice there’s like this instant distortion that happens. The same thing holds two for a lot of other vocalizer voices. For example, if you listen to Tom enhanced in his sample and his actual selection of his voice. He does this like whistling thing that he never used to do. If you select his voice listen to him say the word Settings it sounds like it’s really whistled sound and it never sounded like that before iOS 16. Same thing happens in his sample. It’s just a lot more more muffled sound down. It’s not as clear. So whenever the company who actually makes those voices updated them, they gave him a lower quality and then Apple updated to the newer invoices. So it’s really nothing that can be helped by Apple. They get these voices licensed and they provide them for their devices. So that’s my two cents on that stuff. As far as my computers I used eloquence in jaws for the longest time because I didn’t even know that I could get vocalizer. Trust me, though, as soon as I knew that I got them. I had them back when they were real speak so direct voices on the CDs that you had to get in the mail. I’m sure you guys some of you remember that. So let’s go back even further. Does anybody remember getting flex talk voices and Kurzweil 1000 version 4.0? I was 10 when I had those voices in the old flatbed chunky scanner with big glass thing that you put the papers on to scan it. Those voices were terrible. Especially the female voices. But yeah, I don’t miss those. Somebody had mentioned on here something about dial up Internet before I think it was this thread although I don’t remember now actually no it wasn’t. Never mind. That was something else. Never mind well anyway I don’t miss that either.

I like Zoe Compact usually. It's the easiest to use for long periods. It's a bit gentler sounding than Samantha compact and still goes plenty fast. Not espeak fast, but good enough for most things I do.

Because is easy to follow. Simple is not any other reason.

I had this discussion once with one of my former friends. She says that all of the compact voices and iPhones should be preinstalled and then if we want to download something else, we should be able to download the hamster premium voices. I have to say I had a great with that. Those files are so small they wouldn’t take up that much space to preinstall them all. I’m gonna have to go give Zoe compact a try. Now I’m curious. I’ve never really used that version of her voice. Only the other thing that my farmer friends said was that she couldn’t understand why we had to download some of the Apple voices. I really don’t either. Especially the small ones like Agnes, Bruce, Vicky, in Victoria. Those should already have been preinstalled too. Just my opinion though.

I tried Zoe compact. I wasn’t the biggest fan of her. She didn’t seem to be that expressive. I mean, I guess the compact voices aren’t supposed to be but I guess I expected a tiny bit more. That’s why it’s cool. There’s so many choices for us. I’m back on Samantha enhanced now. It was so fun to try out different voices.

I've even tried the Zoe premium high on my Windows laptop, and I just can't do it. The voice, to me, seems flat and emotionless.

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Getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha, .
One way, or another ... 🎵

Oh! And don't you be talking bad about my beloved Wednesday Addams.
Her seccy! 🥰