I have two iPhones at the moment, an iPhone 15 on iOS 17.0.2 and a 2020 iPhone SE on iOS 17.0.1 (both using Samantha), and I wanted to see if anyone else has been experiencing this ... bug? I'm not quite sure that's the right thing to call it, but it has definitely been bugging me.
This isn't something that seems to get brought up very often, but I've been noticing over the past few years that Voiceover seems to receive a few tweaks to its pronunciation dictionary every time Apple releases a major-ish update to iOS. They're not always very noticeable, but can become pretty obvious when listening to the way certain people's names are pronounced; quick example, for the longest time anyone named Aziza would have to hear themselves be referred to as "Aghh-zih-za" instead of "Uh-zeeza". Sometime around iOS 16.4 or so, Apple made what I personally consider some "correct" adjustments so that a lot of the words which would routinely be mispronounced (such as Aziza) were finally being read correctly. Here's the weird bit: when I updated my iPhone 15 to 17.0.2, Voiceover pronunciation seems to have regressed backward to the state where the Azizas of the world might cringe every time they heard their phones speak their names. On the other hand, the iPhone SE on 17.0.1 is still hanging on to the "correct" pronunciation dictionary. I'm not sure what's going on here—I guess something could have happened either when I was transferring data between the old and new phones or during the update to 17.0.2. Oh well ... any thoughts? Best case scenario the issue fixes itself over the next few days.
By Ravenpaw, 25 September, 2023
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
Yep it's a problem
Karen has been driving me nuts for about six months now. I don't know who changed this but she's been mispronouncing very easy words like thirdly and garbled for no reason I can figure out. I've gone in and forced correct pronunciation on some words (I couldn't take hearing "turdly" all the time) but that doesn't work for everything. I dearly wish I could turn off abbreviations too, I'm quite tired of things like "sat" and "wed" being pronounced as days of the week when they come up at the end of a sentence, like they often do in, you know, English. Ugh.
Glad it isn't just me!
I certainly HOPE nobody at Apple is actually making changes to the dictionary every time. It's actually kind of funny: when the proper pronunciations came out in iOS 16, there was a period of about a month where it was almost like the two dictionaries were fighting for dominance. Restarting Voiceover usually got things back on track for me, but unfortunately it looks like that isn't going to work for the current issue.