Observations with Personal Voice

By KE8UPE, 18 July, 2024

Forum
Apple Beta Releases

Hello,
Recently, I was listening to an episode of Living Blindfully, in which the highlights of WWDC were being discussed.

One of the main topics, that received a lot of hype, was the fact that you can now use your own voice for Voiceover.

As of today, I'm doing that on my iPad & it actually sounds pretty good.
I have however, found some strange things, hence my writing here.
1. Despite having "share across devices" enabled, my phone expects me to record my voice, all over again & gets stuck at the setup process, when I go to that part of settings.
2. On my iPad, where I initially created the voice, the lock screen content is spoken using Samantha, not my voice, as I have it set for Voiceover.
Has anyone seen either of these issues & found a workaround?

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Comments

By Sabrina on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

This seems interesting. I would like to try. How do I do this?

By KE8UPE on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Hi,
Go to settings/accessibility/speech/personal voice & record each of the 150 phrases shown.
It defaults to having phrases appear one right after the other, but I ended up changing mine, so that you have to hit the button, to move to the next phrase & it'll stay onscreen until you're done with it.
Once you've recorded all phrases, plug in & lock your device.
This will allow the voice to process.
I made mine yesterday morning & it took around 12 hours to process.
You can check the progress in settings.
If you enable "share across devices" as I did, it's supposed to appear on all your other devices, after being created on one of them, but mine is stuck.
Any thoughts as to why that might be & more importantly, how to fix it?

By Katie P on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Hi.
Are you running the beta on all of your devices, or are you doin the sensible thing and just running it on one?
If you are only running it on secondary devices and created the voice after installing, this could be why use on all devices is not working.

By KE8UPE on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Hi,
I have the beta on all devices.
It's actually quite stable.

By Lee on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

I've never been able to create a personal voice since it was released. Simply never get to the point where VO reads out phrases. In the past it just went silent. in iOS18 beta I don't even get silence just circles round asking me to continue to create it and does nothing.

By KE8UPE on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Hi,
To use a personal voice with Voiceover, you'll need an iPhone 12 or newer.
What model is the device you're trying to use?

By Lee on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Just tried it again and got the silent treatment this time which was the old quirk. You have to come out of settings to get VO to speak again and when you go back in it has gone back to the original screen to start creating the voice from scratch. So it's strange.

By PaulMartz on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Your device will not use your personal voice until you have authenticated that you are, indeed, you.

By Lee on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Sorry Paul not sure what you mean. How do I authenticate my voice if I can't do anything with my voice lol.

By PaulMartz on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

I did this myself a couple of weeks ago, and found that, indeed, it sounds surprisingly like me, right down to the nasally southeastern Michigan accent.

One problem I've encountered, which pretty much renders it useless, is that individual letters are spoken at a dramatically lower volume, nearly a whisper. This makes navigating by character challenging. I work as a writer and editor, so I'll stick with Samantha for real work.

By Lee on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

iOS18 public beta.

By JC on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Ah ok. well good luck. it sounds to me that it's running normal.

By PaulMartz on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

If your phone is locked, it has no idea whether you are actually you or some rando picking up your phone. Therefore it uses the default voice. It will only use your personal voice after you have unlocked your iDevice (i.e., authenticated), either by entering the passcode or using Face ID or Touch ID.

By KE8UPE on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Hi,
How do I get my phone unstuck, so I can try to use my personal voice on here, in addition to my iPad?

By Brian Giles on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Finally got mine to finish building today though I had to take my charger to work to do it. lol But my personal voice does sound a little bit like me, and it's even somewhat understandable at my normal VO speech rate. It all feels very scifi to me. I remember hearing a podcast in I think around the mid 2000s where someone was trying to demo a windows program that was supposed to do something similar and use your own voice as your synthbut it didn't really work. Wish I could remember what it was so I could go back and listen again, because I remember thinking: what if the day comes when you can actually have your own voice as your screen reader? And now that day is here! It's really trippy!

By KE8UPE on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Brian,
It works great on my ipad but seems stuck on all my other devices.
How can I go about unsticking it?
I've already tried restarting my phone, but unfortunately, it didn't seem to help.

By JC on Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 14:04

Have you tried deleting the Voice and starting over? I know you're going to have to start from scratch again, but that's the only way to work around it until Apple releases the 4th/2nd public beta.