Eloquence finally on iOS

How you have discovered about the Eloquence text to speech(TTS) in IOS? If it is true, It is a great addition and it is one of my favorite voices

I heard only people with access to paid dev accounts can get the 16 beta. If so, this will fix one thing I love about android. Eloquence on IOS? I have always wondered just how that would handle.

Even though I love Alex but the eloquence would bee a nice choice for people like us.

Folks, I don't want to be a wet blanket, but this is beta software and, at this stage, Apple hasn't even made it available as a public beta. It's just intended for developers and the first public beta will be released next month. To keep it short, upgrading to the first beta of iOS 16 would be easy, but reverting to your stable 15.x release would be painstakingly difficult. So do take this into account!
And, in order not to become that quintessential wet blanket, yes, the presence of Eloquence is awesome news and it means Apple is listening, attentively!

As I always like to stress with people who hear new features and rush to get their hands on the beta, please, as Amir said above, take heed. I know that editions like this can be tempting, but also realize that this is the first, and I will repeat, first, beta of iOS 16, released by Apple, intended for developers. As such, expect major issues or glitches.
If you are the type of person who does not want to take the warnings above, I highly suggest that you perform a backup of your device. I would recommend iTunes over iCloud just in case things were to go sideways. But betas like this should not be taken lightly.
The safer option would be to wait until mid July when the public betas are pushed. Even then, take backups, and don't forge ahead without safety measures.
It is also recommended that if you are either waiting or not waiting, to use a secondary device, or a device that is no longer being used, but is still supported by iOS 16.
Good luck, and be careful.
Regards,
Tunmi

Apple has dropped iPhone 6 and 7 models, only supporting the iPhone 8 and above. The SE has also been dropped, however the 2nd and 3rd gen SE's will still make it.
The iPad Air 2nd gen has been dropped, along with the iPad mini 4 and iPad 4. This leaves the iPads with iPad Air 3rd gen and above, iPad 5 and above, and iPad mini 5 and above.
All iPods will not make it to iOS 16, so say goodbye to the iPod Touch 7th gen, as it finally reaches the end of its life and the rest of all the iPods, at iOS 15.

Sorry, I don't see why so many of you are happy to hear that robotic Eloquence voice again, except that it takes less memory resources and therefore might be a few miliseconds more reactive than others!

Sorry, but what you call "robotic" sounds more natural than almost all of the so-called humanlike voices that are on offer. It also has better intonation patterns, relatively fewer mispronunciations, and is more intelligible with higher speeds. Moreover, I know many deaf-blind users who say that Eloquence is the best choice for them. Of course - and above all, giving more choices to users is always a good decision regardless of whether or not we adore or despise a certain engine. Since iOS and macOS are closed operating systems and third-party engines are mostly barred from competing with what Apple offers, providing more choices, and more languages, is an absolute must, and Apple is, IMO, rising to the challenge quite elegantly and efficiently. iOS 16, for instance, also provides Persian (Farsi), Vietnamese, Ukrainian and many other language-specific voices as part of its so-called Vocalizer roster.

Hi,

Patrick As someone with a hearing problem, as in, there is very little of it to begin with, eloquence is a really good thing. The robotic nature of the voice is predictable and can be set to the ideal pitch for the deafblind individual using it.

The fact that Eloquence pause in a very even manner is also a good thing, so is it's very regular pronunciation.

All the above mentioned attributes makes it ideal for very high speed use.

Example, I, with very little hearing can run eloquence at over 500 wpm, but these newer "Human like" voices has to be slowed down to about human speaking rates, (between 150 and 220 wpm) for them to stay understandable.

I only wish someone would make Espeak available for use with Voiceover. That thing can go up to 800 wpm and stay understandable.

I just want to clarify, is this actually happening? All I heard was we were getting voices that were optimised for higher speed listening. Where did you hear that eloquence is being included? If we do end up getting access to eloquence in VoiceOver, I look forward to using it again.

I agree with Amir Eloquence in iOS is a really good thing!!! Again Apple listens to its users Nice Job Apple!!!!!!

@Craig actually this is really happening, because I have tried the iOS 16 developer beta, And eloquence is really there

Well is VO updated? Yes or no! Picture this! You have a car that is 10 years old and get new features to make it work. Nice colors but the Engine that makes the software work does not work well. This is VO. Voices are not nice but what about making sure VO works with Braille display, VO works after you hand off call! Making sure search works well with VO! Notification works when the screen is lock. Before you muted phone VO did not speak on the lock screen. Now you have to do so many things to get the sane result. I am planning to get the 14 pro max and I expect it to work well as the sane for a sighted person.

I'm not in a good mood to address well-known pessimists - at least today. Sorry - couldn't resist - and the stated expectation, no matter how Panglossian, is ill-conceived.

OK. Like I stated what is the point of doing all that nice features if VO does not work well? Mac VO does not do well. I do not get my phone for free, I will pay for it.

It's about time! yes, apple is finally listening to us. Eloquence has been my favorite synthesizer since Jaws and NVDA, but having it finally imported into iOS? encredible!! thank you apple!

I think that it's a great news that eloquence will be available for us! I never used and understood it, but I know many people around the world love it. I agree about eSpeak, if eloquence is added, eSpeak can be added too, but I am afraid apple won't do that due to the fact of updating commits each time when new changes are made to it.

Hello eloquencers. How does the Voice-over works with the ETI? please let me know.

Hi. If this is true, I am pleased. I am curious on how these voices sound. maybe this will come to light in future betas.

Eloquence is indeed included in iOS and Mac OS as well, along with practically the entire range of Vocalizer voices from Cerence, formally Nuance. The reason it was able to be included is because Cerence now owns it, and Apple most likely has a contract with them to continue providing Vocalizer, along with Eloquence. Frankly, this is a huge deal. Apple is now the first main stream tech company to include a software synthesizer loved by blind people for its responsiveness and speed, and make no mistake, they did this for us. To people saying that they wish Eloquence would die, please stop with the negativity. A lot of people still like this synth, including myself, and it's not like you don't have other voices to choose from. More choice is always better, and it's clear now that Apple truly cares about accessibility, and doing right by their users. Do they have bugs? Absolutely, and we should call them out whenever we feel that they are not doing the best they can, but I can honestly say that compared to most other big tech companies, they really know what people with disabilities need, and they want to do the best for them. I really hope that an interview with Sarah and the team is coming soon to discuss this in more detail, as I would love to know the thought process behind the decision to include Eloquence. This is something people have been wanting for years and years, and finally it's happened. This is a small thing as well, but Eloquence is included in the base distribution of the operating system. It is not an add-on that you have to download or install, it will always be there.

@Holger Fiallo, I'll be blunt. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to stick to ios or mac... if you don't like them, or they have bugs that you cannot deal with... just switch. Simple as that. However, all software has bugs. There are stuff microsoft hasn't fixed as far as blind people as well.
This was a long awaited voice, and i'm really excited that not will ios have it, but also mac. I agree with others about elequence, not to mention it is the only voice that speaks exclamationmarks and is clear. Fread speaks exclamations but its not as clear as elequence.

yes, Eloquence is here finally. The bit rate seems to be lower than you would find with JAWS or NVDA. You also have to crank up the speed to 90% to get it as fast as say 60 or 65 in JAWS or NVDA. Also, it announces apostrophes in words such as can't, don't, won't, ETC. Over all though, I am glad it is on the phone for those who love it. Will I still use it? I'm actually on the fence on that.

Just my $0.02!

Well talk back is crap and VO is the next thing. I am sure those nice people who use Braille will agree that it took forever for Apple to fix it and now will see if iOS 16, will continue to fix it or make it worse. Microsoft did not do well in the phone market. No issues with voices but is time that we do not get so happy when Apple throw us a bone. I am going to use the E voice because I have it on my jaws 2022 and I like it. I will keep the sane voice I am using for my 12 pro.

I for one won't be using it, especially if apostrophes are announced. To me, Eloquence belongs on the computer. LOL! Still, I'm glad people who need it and want it have it.

Given that this is the first beta, this problem will probably get fixed in the upcoming releaces. I'm on the fence about testing the public beta... I want to, but again, I just have the one phone so... we'll see.

Remember this is only beta one, they have not optimized eloquence at all. It can't even say "iPhone" correctly lol, but they will doubtless fix these issues before final release. As for the sample rate, I personally haven't noticed it, but I don't have the beta installed on my phone, I'm only going by what other people have shown me. It sounds very similar to Jaws in my view, but it's possible it's slightly lower quality. There are a few factors that could contribute to this, possibly processing hardware, but I don't think it's a huge deal personally. Again, I would strongly encourage people that have a secondary device and who are comfortable to download the public beta and submit as much feedback as possible, especially since this is a completely new synthesizer that has never been implemented in Apple hardware officially before.

As I am sitting here reading this forum thread, I chose to sit at my desk and use my PC. So JAWS is currently reading to me this delightful news. I have utilized other synthesizers dating back to the mid 80s and I can tell you that the Elloquence voice that JAWS uses is far superior than any other non-iPhone synthesizer that I've previously used.

Apple has introduced several new voices, during my many years as an iPhone user. Don't throw rocks at me here, but I have simply never liked any other voice for daily use than the original compact Samantha voice, not even the enhanced version. I know there are many haters of the compact voice on the AppleVis site, but for me, I would rather have a clean voice, one which enunciates words clearly and still speaks at a high rate of speed, simultaneously, without becoming muddy. None of the other voice offerings meets these criteria for me. I have no hearing impairment so this isn't a factor. When I'm reading a Kindle book or doing other tasks on the iPhone, when the words are all jammed up or the synthesizer pauses in unnatural places within the context of a sentence, I find it extremely annoying and distracting. This is why I continue to stay with Samantha. It is beyond my understanding why these other voices, though they sound different, would be plagued with these types of behaviors on the same device, when the Samantha just doesn't seem to struggle with these issues.

When we first became able to use the Siri voices for daily tasks, I thought I might just change away from Samantha, but sadly, Siri fails miserably, as well. For Siri work, the original male voice and the new male voice, who sounds like he might be from the southern states, here in the US, are two of my favorite Siri voices. I dislike the female offerings across the board.

Having said all of that, I am truly excited to see Elloquence finally landing in the Apple patch. Call me skeptical, but I will have to see if it truely makes me switch away from Samantha. Heres hoping that my favorite Jaws vpoice finally becomes my daily companion in my Apple life.

To those who stayed to the end of my long opinion on this matter, thank you for reading.

@Roxann Pollard nicely - and eloquently - put - no pun intended! Of course, for me it comes down to the choice between Alex and Eloquence. I've never been able to digest and come to terms with any Vocalizer voice regardless of their Compact/Enhanced/Pro status. What's more, Siri voices are, to my ears at least, super-expressive for use with VoiceOver, and that's why I keep returning to Alex - even now that I'm testing iOS 16 Beta 1. This is just the first beta and my sincere hope is that Apple fix some issues related to Eloquence to make it an Alex competitor. Finally - and for the record, I also use Eloquence on Windows with JAWS and NVDA and prefer it to everything else for the reasons you efficaciously mentioned.

I know that I'm in the minority, but I've never been a fan of eloquence. For those of you who are happy about this, I think that's fantastic, and I genuinely hope that it works well for you. I wasn't planning to respond to this thread at all, but I was intrigued to read that people with hearing loss prefer eloquence because it's easier to hear/understand. I've had the opposite experience. Last time I had my hearing tested, I had 35 percent hearing loss in my right ear and 70 percent loss in my left ear; would venture to say that things have declined since then, but don't know for sure. Anyway, I use the Vocalizer expressive voices for JAWS, not just because they sound more natural, but also because, at least in my experience, Eloquence is a lot quieter/sounds really muffled. I mean, if I were to switch to eloquence right now, the volume of my speech would decrease significantly. I'll most definitely check out all the new TTS options when iOS is officially released later this year, but I can't imagine anything that will be good enough to make me stop using my buddy Alex. LOL!

to say eloquence should die is like a sighted person saying, I wish the times new roman font would die. some like times new roman 10 point while others like courier new 14 point. They are both ok.

@Holger Fiallo I question why you use apple? You never have anything positive to say about apple!!!!!!! The bottom line is Apple listens to its users. If Jonathan Mosen is correct Hid support won't be in Android 13. Do you criticize google for that? Do you Criticize Google that it was 4 years ago they Microsoft, and Apple all agreed to implement the Hid standard yet 4 years later it still hasn't been done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! See this press release to prove my point.
https://www.alphr.com/technology/1009481/apple-microsoft-google-braille-display-standard/
Do you criticize Google for not having a system wide dictionary no system wide copy and paste? Are you this Critical of Google for taking Years to improve Braille support? Yet your jumping on Apple for their braille issues. At least Apple has resolved them!!! At Least Apple listens to the customers!!!!!

Honestly have to agree here. If you don't have anything Nice to say about the products, you should switch, or stop posting on here with the same things over and over again. It gets really tiring to keep reading your negative opinions, not saying they aren't valid, but posting once or twice is more than enough. Try Android for a month and I'm sure you'll have many of the same concerns. Nothing is perfect, and it is unreasonable to expect all bugs to be fixed immediately upon release of the software. That's just never going to happen with any operating system, and instead of commenting on here with the same things over and over, right to Apple accessibility expressing your concerns, and give practical solutions to solve them, then see how far you get. Sorry, I don't usually like calling people out like this, but it really needed to be said.

Zachary I agree with you 1000000000000%

I used to use Eloquence constantly, but since I've acquired a moderate hearing loss, I notice that I don't hear consonants enunciated clearly when I have used it more recently. I find Alex to be the most understandable, but I'm looking forward to trying my old speech synth buddy again to see if my earlier impression of it since my hearing loss stil applies. I'm excited because choice of accessible options is very important.

I agree with the previous poster. that's all I'm going to say about it. and like I always say, different strokes for different folks.

I have heard a lot of negativity and a lot of absurd things lately about Apple and Eloquence! People who say Eloquence should die, I am sorry, but YOUR WISH WILL NEVER BEE FULL FILL(written in all caps). And why are you using the Apple products if you don't like them? I also do have Criticism and tips for them but I want to make them better then they all-ready are! If you hate the company that much, but I am very sorry to say THIS, YOU-SHOULD NOT BEE AT THIS WEBPAGE OR THE PART OF THE ECO-SYSTEMIN GENERAL(in all caps)
I also do not like to call out people, but I had to say it.

It's great to have those novelty voices included in iOS 16. Even if they are not meant for daily use, they could be used at any moment for a bit of fun! Singing voices? A fantastic way to read something boring.

Here’s what I found on my Twitter timeline:
https://twitter.com/Simon818/status/1533930615556296705

just a quick warning to you guys, we go shopping the developer beta onto your devices, I must warn you that this Beto it’s pretty buggy, and it’s the time of the comment Apple released it yesterday, so I advise waiting or downloading it onto a secondary device that you don’t use, and if you can’t or don’t wanna do any of those things at least back up your phone to iCloud or iTunes just in case things decide to break

I use eloquence on my ipad pro running ipados 16 beta.

Shout out to the blind-power YouTuber
https://youtube.com/shorts/xMJHyLNa144?feature=share

Well that's one way to get more VoiceOver users to beta test; just give half the blind community the synthesizer we've all wanted for more than 10 years.

Maybe if people want to jump on the public beta train because they just like Eloquence that much more than the current options (myself included), more people will report VO bugs that Apple can hopefully address before the final release shortly after the fall event. I've installed the public betas a few times, and only regretted it with iOS13 because of that nasty bug where VO would completely lock up after you hung up a call, which meant you had to force restart your phone to get it back, resulting in who knows how many unintended emergency services calls. That bug didn't get resolved until 13.2 came out a couple months later.

I agree that it's not advisable to install a beta on your primary device unless you understand the risk your taking doing that. The argument could be made though, that not everyone has a secondary device that can run the new iOS version, so fewer people beta test, which means fewer bugs get reported, which means more little issues that could be resolved slipping through to the release version.

As for people complaining about bugs in general, this forum is just that: a forum. It's exactly like any mainstream Apple-centric forum, like Apple Insider or Mac Rumors. Forum posts there are similar; half the people complain that iOS has looked boring since iOS7 and want a complete redesign especially now that Johnny Ive is gone, or they want to be able to be able to put app icons *anywhere* on the home screen. This stuff makes no sense to me as a blind person, and just sounds like power users who want Android on their iPhones. The other half of people complain that they just want Apple to do a "Snow Leopard" version of iOS and just fix bugs and nothing more.

I wonder how Apple was able to finally include all the new voices in iOS16. It is great they are doing it though, and for free to boot. I would've gladly dropped 20 bucks to have Eloquence on my iPhone.

I use apple because I like it. However I do not get happy every time apple release a nice feature. Yes HID is not coming in Android 13 which google made a mistake and will deal with it. Lucky for me I do not use Braille. However I feel for those who deal with the headache every time they use it. I just want apple to update VO. Is that to much to ask instead of giving a nice features? Hope not.

47 comments and counting on this thread and I've still found a novel question to ask: do we get british English Eloquence like we do with JAWS? I know most people are comfortable with the American English version but for me, the British English voice has been easier on the ear ever since I started using Eloquence in 2000. I'd definitely find a use for Eloquence in IOS16 if the british English voice is available.

The subject line says it all.

I know it's not really recommended to install betas on your primary device in case there's some critical bugs like what you mentioned with iOS 13 and the bug we're seeing in iOS 16 where you can't pull up the lock screen by pressing the side button unless you turn off VoiceOver off, activate and dismiss siri, or unplug it from the wall in order to force the lock screen, but my thing is if you don't install it on your primary device I feel like you won't catch as many bugs as you would if it was on your primary device sense you're constantly using it so you might find a bug without even trying.

I was a beta tester for the Nuance Talks for Nokia phones back in the day. Did it have bugs from time to time? Yes I got bugs on my primary device. So if you know the risks and possible rewards and are willing to put up with them knowing you will get them fixed go for the betas on your primary device. Just know Beta doesn't mean it will be bug free. If you aren't prepared to deal with it don't do it its that simple. One other advantage to the betas if you stay in it you get the fixes before everyone else :)

It's great to read such excitement and anticipation for the new voices that Apple is making available to us VoiceOver users.

However, a few comments on this thread are straying outside of our posting guidelines that relate to discussion of pre-release Apple software.

Consequently, we would like to politely remind people of the two types of posts which our guidelines ask people to avoid:

• Discussion of bugs introduced or fixed in a beta release.
• Anything which could be considered as technical support with beta software. For example, seeking help with installing/using beta software or problems with native or third-party apps after installing a beta.

The guidelines can be read in our FAQ section at Can I post information or ask questions about beta or preview versions of Apple software?

Thanks for your respect of these guidelines.

Now back to how great it will be to have more voices available ☺️