Is Siri About to Get a New Voice with Gemini Integration?

My take is no. The siri voice is part of the Apple brand—for better or worse—the jemini AI will only cover the backend.

Saying that, it might be that Apple have some new voices in the pipeline to "refresh" the perception of Siri which, of late, hasn't been great.

What apple is using Gemini is for processing Siri. It will be not be part of google.

No

I wish we were going to get some new serious voices. There needs to be new South African voices and new Irish voices and we need some Scottish voices. I just think every choice should have an equal number of voices. They should probably even be a new British theory in new Australian theory so those can all have five choices just like American does. And then they should do the same thing for South African, Indian and Irish all of those don’t just have two choices. I just feel like it would be fair that way for all the equal number of voices. I think the same thing happened for the other languages too. As far as the voice is for voiceover, I like what we have for that. I’m using Kait and hands on my iPhone SE third generation and Karen premium on my iPhone 15.

Why not work on making VO more stable and fix bugs instead of wishes. Long live cats.

I agree with Holger. And not just because of long live cats! We have plenty of voice options. Fix the bugs please!

I don't think the people creating siri or its voices are the same team as accessibility.

I always agree with fixing bugs. I also don't think it is an either or situation. Apple are good at working out cost to benefit ratios.

FYI, 1 trillion Dollar apple is worth. VO need a reform or a new and improve VO. "Voices, we do not need no stinking voices".

We can wish for whatever we want. People can wish for new voices and people can wish for bugs to be fixed. There’s no reason that we can’t have both things. Apple can work on fixing bugs and give us new voices if they want to. Like I said, I’m happy with the ones that we have but it would be cool. That’s all I’m saying. There’s different teams that work on different aspects of the Apple software. The voices are totally different from the voiceover voices anyway. I think it would be really cool to be able to use the voice voice for Siri if we want to. We can already use Voice for voiceover so we should be able to have the other ability as well. Anybody can wish for whatever we want. Nobody should be told they can’t wish for things I’m here. Everybody has the right to their own opinions.

Something like D'vora, from Mortal Kombat. After all, nothing says love like a 6 foot tall humanoid female cockroach.
Talk about 'buggy' voices... 🐞

They tend to be different propositions. I also think that, if Siri becomes more conversational, there will be more off device processing for the voice. Currently Siri is generated on device and its... Well, okay. It does mean we can use it for voiceover, though I'm not a big fan. If Siri is to become more in line with other AI offerings and more conversational, it will require greater processing and context awareness. I don't think phones can do that... Though maybe they can, I'm not sure. What we won't get is new voices for voiceover every day use from it though. The way things like chat GPT and Eleven Labs works is for the LLM to process the entire document, work out tone, emphasis, etc, and return it as an audio stream. This would be far too slow for voiceover, it would also not work as it wouldn't know the context of what we're typing.

I do wonder if there could be a hybrid situation where it recognises the task we're using voiceover for, navigation, text editting, article reading, and could switch based on that to give us more nuance for long form listening.

Saying that, I'm not holding my breath for voiceover improvements. I sent a rather strongly worded email to apple—god, have I turned into my dad?—the other day and their response was, yeah yeah, we know it's god problems, we're working on it. We can't share timelines.

So, a brush off.

But back to the original question for this thread, I don't think any new voices, should they arrive, have anything to do with accessibility or voiceover, at least, not to begin with.

Wait for iOS 50. It will be great.

Holger is right, although I probably wouldn't have put it that way lol.

A lot of people here want more voices, and I guess voices can be like fonts, use the one that best fits the situation.

I'm happy with what we have, but if you're not satisfied, that's on you, as long as my device does what it's suppose to, that's enough for me.

Personally, I can't stand any of the Gemini voices, even the aussie versions sound, bleh, but I eventually settled on, I think her name is Lyra.