Why do you choose a device voice?

Long form reading

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.

Great topic

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.

Re: Long form reading

It's that way for the most part with me, Brian. Singer Girl and I were discussing the inadequacy of voices that were only raised in pitch to create a supposed female voice. This is how it was done in the 80s and 90s. I can tolerate and become used to a robotic voice, but only if it is in a lower pitch. I don't know if female voices are more complicated to produce. I had some singing and stagecraft training when I was young, and know that the male falsetto is rarely the equivalent of a female chest voice, that voices can be very complicated.
I used that voice, Bobby, that was supposed to be a boy voice on JAWS for a long time, only because the computer I had at that time didn't have too good of an audio output, and Bobby didn't hurt my ears over time.
I use the stock Samantha on my iPhone. She is good enough at the rapid speech I require for sanity, doesn't have annoying pauses, and is just there when I pick up a new iPhone.
However, I truly appreciate and enjoy a good female voice on a device that is speaking to me. There was a Microsoft platform voice of some sort that I used with NVDA that required a weird plugin to get rid of the speech pauses. I'm not entirely sure why, but perhaps the female voice can come across friendlier to me, and that may be a social construct of some sort. I would just rather not listen to the high quality male voices all the time.

Re: Great topic

It seems like you might have the same reaction, that the good female voices are friendlier, Singer Girl. And I just thought of another thing. I don't feel quite right having the device speaking in a male voice when I'm around other people. That seems to be consistent for me. I seem to remember that there was research done on this and that often female voices are used in the public announcement systems because they are more apt to be listened to or something like that. I'll have to look into it.
* in fact, I just remembered, there was a man down the street speaking to someone in an authoritative sounding tone yesterday, no idea what he was saying, and I kind of felt spooked or threatened. That might be part of what is going on in the male voices for me right now, but I consistently prefer the female voice. It's not that way with the lower pitched robotic voices, they're just kind of there for me, and not much emotion.

I’ve been this way since I was a little kid

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.

Interesting

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.

why I choose the voice

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 it was the speakers

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.

Re: I’ve been this way since I was a little kid

I wasn't blind until just before I was a teen, so I don't really know about device voices before that. Oh gees, then one's own voice might change around that time and give a whole different prospective.
Anyway, I might come back to this thread and look over the posts to see if I feel differently later on. I think it's always been a preference for hearing female voices, and a little uncomfortable with assertive sounding male voices. Although, women yelling make me feel like I did something wrong. Feelings about singing voices, a whole different complicated world.

Blindness and speech synthesis

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.

Yeah, that version of Samantha’s pretty awesome

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.