combining grapheme joiner with alex on iPhone

By Zach M, 5 April, 2026

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi all. I have a weird thing with alex, that's going to annoy the crap out of me. Or... maybe I'm the only one experiencing it? When reading a notification, especially from gmail, but mail does it too, and it's especially apparent with marketing emails, it'll keep repeating "combining grapheme joiner, combining grapheme joiner, combining grapheme joiner"... over and over and over again. alex is one of my favorite voices on iOS, but it's the only voice in my testing that does it. I haven't tested it with other macintalk voices, but I was wondering if any of you have comments or feedback on how to fix it?

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Comments

By Brian on Sunday, April 5, 2026 - 23:51

See if you can add that in the pronunciation dictionary, and just replace it with a space or something, if you can, at least you won't have to hear that symbol anymore.

HTH.

By Zach M on Sunday, April 5, 2026 - 23:56

I tried that, but it didn't work when I tested it. It didn't work.

By Singer Girl on Monday, April 6, 2026 - 01:28

That’s definitely strange. I’ve seen some issues that were specific to certain Voice synthesizer. So that could just be something with that particular synthesizer. Hopefully you’ll get this issue resolved though. I know what it’s like when your favorite voice does something really weird and you don’t keep using the voice because you love it and then have to do something else.