Eloquence has change once again, for the better!

I'm absolutely impressed! I love it! Once again they've made eloquence sound a lot more improved.!

I'm glad that the crackling is gone but on my iPhone SE-3, using the Reed voice, it's sounding a bit distorted and maybe slightly compressed. Is anyone else experiencing the same? Those who have responded positively so far, I'm curious to know what phone and voice you're using.

What's even more frustrating is that eloquence on Mac OS Beta 4 sounded great but the one on Beta 5 sounds disgusting! I hope it's just a bug that will resolve itself on its own.

I liked eloquence before, but now it sounds so disgusting for me! Like a broken toy voice! I never used it on Windows as my main synthesizer, but what I know from Jaws and NVDA sounds so much better! Someone mentioned the compression, yes, the voice is compressed so much, it can be also noticed on iPhone 13, not only in SE 3!

I agree with the fact that eloquence has changed, but really disagree with the opinion that it's for the better. I've tried to find a setting that would at least be able to toggle between the qualities, but there doesn't seem to be one at this point. It's just a beta though, so I'm hoping for at least the option eventually.

I love the eloquence text to speech myself. I want apple to add other settings of the program.

If you use Spring, I am finding that Eloquence is not reading everything. For example. here in Charlotte our public transportation service is called CATS, (Charlotte Area Transportation System). We have daily updates on driver shortages.

Do the following to reproduce this one.

1. Open Spring
2. Look for @catsridetransit
3. Find this tweet and read it with Eloquence, then switch to another voice. You will notice a difference.
Due to operator absences, expect intermittent delays on CATS bus routes. Today's bus operator
absences: 96  

You will notice that Eloquence does not say anything about today's number of absences, just the fact that delays are going to occur. Alex tells you everything on the tweet.

I'm not sure if that would be a report for apple or for the dev of this app. Keep in mind this is beta software and bugs are still present, and apps haven't been updated for ios 16 yet.

I've been using Eloquence over here in android land and now I'm jealous all you get official support and updates for Reed and company on your iPhones. I will say I definitely think Jaws eloquence sounds better than my android version which, to me, sounds exactly like the NVDA eloquence addon. Does it still randomly crackle on certain words for you folks? It's my main phone synthesizer and, even on the best settings, it will still make subtle angry popping noises now and then. I think we're just dealing with an older synthesizer and don't get to take advantage of all the work Freedom/Vespero/whoever they are now put into Jaws eloquence over the years.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I heard Freedom has to pay Apple licensing fees now. Is that true?

With iOS 16 Beta 5 - AKA Public Beta 3, Eloquence has apparently been upsampled. However, something is definitely wrong because, to me and with my iPhone 13 Pro Max, it now sounds more like a voice coming out of the speaker of a doll. It has gained more clarity but in the upper range, resulting in an unbalanced sound. Eloquence sounds much more balanced in NVDA and JAWS. As such, I think I'm going to concur with Vsevolod Popov's "toy" analogy in the 6th comment. Of course, it's not disgusting, but I don't like it. And, while we're at it, something similar has apparently happened to Alex in this beta as it reads consonants like s and z more clearly. I like this level of clarity with Alex, but the same trick doesn't work with Eloquence.

@Holy Diver Don't worry because you had oceans of time to enjoy Eloquence on that side of the pond -- smile! Seriously, I don't get any of that crackling which, BTW, I've seen on Android and, by a less noticeable degree, in Kurzweil 1000. With that said, however, it still requires a lot of fine-tuning on the part of Apple as, to my ears, it's not yet on a par with NVDA and JAWS.

I agree with the post that said that it sounds sort of toyish. I think this still needs work, however this isn't a bug per say, so how would we report it? Feature request?

@Igna Triay, IMO, when a voice or a TTS engine sounds weird, we're dealing with a bug. It might be related to the engine being upsampled or something akin to that, but I think the change in iOS 16 Beta 5 should be reported as a bug. It might be part of an effort by Apple to optimize Eloquence, so the more we provide feedback, the more optimized it will become.

Maybe it will be fix on it next week. Probably not. I am using Evans the quality of the voice is great. Maybe apple will remove it if does not work well. Is so much that you can do with E. Remember is old and has not been updated for a long time. I do not think anyone has worked on eloquence for a long time. I probably will not use it. Hope apple focus on bugs instead on it.

Use it on my Windows PC with Windows 10 and jaws 2022. The sound is much beter and respond fast. Voice sound is fantastic. In the iPad 9 that is not the same.

I agree that Eloquence sounds a little bit different in these new betas, and it's a little bit annoying. I don't get the 16 KHZ thing some people have mentioned though. To me, Eloquence sounds a little bit distorted, almost like the volume is turned up too high. It's not as noticeable if I'm using my AirPods Pro though. On the plus side, the crackling that used to happen when reading in certain apps seems, to me at least, to be gone.

Although, I'm also noticing Eloquence cutting off when reading some things. I've noticed it most in Twitterific, but also in the Messages app, where it won't read the date at the end of the message consistently. For some it works as it should, but others it cuts off after reading the message. Samantha and Fred read everything as normal, so this seems to be a bug specific to Eloquence.

My question is, what's the best way for a bunch of us to report bugs like this? Like if someone reports it and then posts their feedback number here to share in another report, what would be the best way to do that? Do you just mention the feedback number in the body of your report in the feedback app? Does that make sense?

After filing feedback about this issue yesterday, I appended the suggestion to make the 11 kHz versions of the voices as the standard version along with the 16 kHz versions as enhanced. Like they offer with the Vocalizer voices, such as Samantha and Tom.

I reported a couple bugs with Eloquence to Apple. The distortion thing and Eloquence stopping before reading all the text, and sometimes skipping over parts of longer blocks of text.

This second one is almost a show stopper for me. I booked an Uber to get home from work today and Eloquence wasn't reading all of the status of my ride -- it stopped before it normally tells you your driver's info, like what kind of car they're driving and their license plate. Fortunately, I knew to read by word to get the rest of the info, but you wouldn't know to do that if you werweren't familiar with what VO is trying to read.

Yes that's a third-party app, but the issue happens in several apps, so it's a VO issue, not something that can be fixed in updates to the apps you're using.

I tried switching back to Samantha compact for now, but after using Eloquence I just can't! Looking back through feedback I have filed in previous betas, I did one for a similar issue with VO stopping reading in the middle of text back in iOS 10, and it was fixed in the next beta. Hoping Apple can nail down these ones too.

No issues with him at this time. Change voice to avoid this.

Eloquence now sounds tinny on my iPad Pro. The clicking is gone, which is positive. But I prefer how the voices sounded in the previous beta. I like Julian's suggestion that they could offer the 11 kHz version as standard and 16 kHz as enhanced. Going to leave feedback and include that, in the hopes that they'll consider it if they see it mentioned more often.

"Mixed-case processing" is currently disabled in Eloquence for iOS, and that results in words such as "iPhone," "iTunes" and "iMessage" being mispronounced. As such, "mixed-case processing" should be enabled for Eloquence - its Windows and non-iOS counterparts do support this. As things stand right now, Eloquence has serious pronunciation issues and this stands in sharp contrast with other voices provided by iOS. To handle this, would it be possible to integrate the following comprehensive dictionary set into Eloquence for iOS? https://github.com/thunderdrop/IBMTTSDictionaries

Unfortunately, no Eloquence for me during this beta.
While I dislike the sound of this new one, that's not what made me stop using it, rather this huge bug someone mentioned where it simply refuses to read certain texts.
In my testing, it has to do with multiple paragraphs, and in fact you can reproduce it without any 3rd party apps, so it's absolutely an Eloquence problem.

Open messages and compose a new message. Ignore the recipient as that is not important, and double tap the edit box to write your message. There, type the following:
Hello,

this is a test.

It is very important to type it exactly, with 2 new lines after hello.
If you now focus the edit box, Eloquence will only read hello and not the part following it.

I certainly hope this gets fixed before the public release, since making it unusable like this would be a real shame.

I did report the fact elequence isn't speaking everything.

If people aren't going to report bugs then don't sign up for the Betas. I reported the bug.

Well do not use eloquenc so can not make reports on it. Not planning to do so. Sorry guies.

There's no need to be harsh, because nobody said that they aren't reporting what they are encountering.
Obviously the bug will be reported, the point of the post is to make it easier for others to reproduce it, and test if it is resolved in a future update.

Good to know that Eloquence not reading everything is sometimes triggered by new paragraphs. I think something else causes it to stop reading too, but I can't figure it out. I can consistently reproduce it in Twitter, where it won't read anything after one of my follower's display names. It reads others fine though, and there's no text I can see that might cause it.

I know Eloquence has, or at least used to have, certain words that would make it crash, though I never ran into it with JAWS/NVDA.

Hi,
if Eloquence encounters one of these crashwords, Samantha reads them instead, after which Eloquence is working again as usual.
In fact, generally in iOS 16, Samantha comes up if your main voice isn't working or crashes unexpectedly.

I have tested the issue of Eloquence skipping texts and reported it by using continuous symbols. For instance, anything following or preceding star signs, ***, or ellipsis ..., are not read. This message itself can be used to test the bug.