Losing Karen premium voice sent updating to iOS 26

By sultan, 25 September, 2025

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Since updating to IOS 26 my Karen premium voice disappears when my phone dies or I have to turn it off. When this happens I have to put it back into the language rota. Does anyone have any ideas?

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Comments

By Michael Hansen on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 13:03

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

One thing we have seen with some of the issues during the iOS 26 beta cycle is that a reset of VoiceOver settings resolves the problem. If you are willing to reconfigure your customizations, it may be worth a try. Go to Settings> Accessibility> VoiceOver> Reset VoiceOver Settings.

By Singer Girl on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 13:43

I had the same problem and Karen premium is my favorite voice. So what I ended up doing was using regular Karen for now. Apple is aware that there’s an issue with multiple voices not working at all. I mean that voice won’t even activate. It’ll act as though it’s downloading and then when you push the button to activate the voice, it’s just the regular character premium however the file size sizes that’s it. So my workaround has been to just use regular care for now. I would definitely prefer Karen premium, but unfortunately, she’s not the only Voice who doesn’t work. There are multiple voices that don’t work. I even tried getting Matilda and Hanson and Matilda premium and both of those don’t work either so the only Matilda that’s working is the regular Matilda. I don’t know if that’s a good workaround for you or not but the only other option that you can do is at least that I’ve seen to use Karen enhanced if you can’t get premium to work. I haven’t tried resetting all the voiceover settings. I actually forgot that that was an option. I think I may try that and see if I can get Karen premium back. I’ll report back here and let you know. This would be on an iPhone 15 for me. It’s just the regular iPhone 15.

By sultan on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 13:48

So I can get it to download and it works until my phone dies or I have to close shut my phone down and start again

By Brian on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 14:00

Does anyone remember, I believe it was iOS 17, where every time someone would plug their phone into recharge, their preferred voices would just disappear? Wondering if something similar is happening here?

By Lee on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 14:09

Brian, think I recall this. Bingo had issues I think. Or, at least he was the one person I recall bringing it up time and again as it wasn't being fixed.

By Tuesdale daybreaker on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 15:04

I can do some work on this. I don't use Karen a lot but may get it so as to be able to help. It is a good voice though and I understand it is frustrating when your prefered voice is failing. I had an issue with US Siri voice four made a terrible sound from time to time and I had to use a braille display to change voice to make it stop. That was a very odd, loud sound that did ot sound like a voice at all and I am not sure how it did that.