strange issue with Siri voices on iPhone13 Pro

By mendi, 30 October, 2023

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Is anyone else seeing this odd behavior? I am using, or trying to use rather, Siri voice 3. However, for no apparent reason and completely at random, my voice over will switch to using Samantha, and then when I switch to something else and back to Siri again I have to download the voice again. It's as if my phone randomly deletes the Siri voice. Does anyone have any earthly idea what is happening here?

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Comments

By Zachary on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 08:43

Yes, this has been a problem for a while. The same thing happens on macOS as well. To get around this, use the same Siri voice with both voiceover and Siri. Hopefully Apple can fix this soon, there are many speech bugs that they need to address.

By Aymeric on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 08:43

Indeed, I've noticed the same problem occurring across all my apple Devices (iPhone, Apple TV and Mac) and with all languages. When will Apple correct that remains to be seen. for instance, one year ago, a petition was sent to Apple's accessibility department requiring the French Siri voices on VoiceOver to be fixed as it has been plagued with many issues. So far, nothing has been done, while the French Canadian voices work way better. Go figure!

By Levi Gobin on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 08:43

I haven't been using the natural voices just because of that reason. Pro tip, you can get the big ones that don't delete themselves by adding them to activities. Create an activity and go to siri, and you will see the big old siri voices.

By Missy Hoppe on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 08:43

I'm glad you got a response confirming that Apple is aware of this issue. It's such a bizarre bug, and I can't imagine what kind of software glitch would be causing it. Like you, I have a 256 GB phone, and I have always preferred to stream all of my music, so have approximately 150 GB free on my device. So, there's definitely no reason why the voices should be deleting themselves. On the other side of the coin, even though I have 0 downloaded songs, my phone claims that music has nearly 7 GB of data. It's not as though I am low on space, but at the same time, I'm truly baffled what that data consists of and would love to free up that space somehow. I think there's just something buggy about iPhone storage in general, although if this has been going on on macs and the watch as well... Who knows! All I know is that even though I've found a work-around for now, I would like to be able to reliably use the Spanish Spain female siri voice for duolingo. Marisol just isn't as easy for me to to hear or understand.

By al-Salil on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 08:43

I'd say that Apple Music is caching/buffering songs and that's why you see it uses 7 GB.
I have the same thing with Spotify.
0 downloads but cache is 11 GB, so Spotify definitely stores songs you listen to on your device cache.
In Spotify I can clean this up by tapping clear cache in settings.

By Missy Hoppe on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 08:43

Once upon a time, I seem to recall that if you went into iphone storage, you could clear caches and stuff like that. Now, it shows me the 7GB that music is using, but my only option is to delete the app, which might fix the problem for a day or 2, but then it zooms right back up to the 7 GB or so. If nothing else, I think they should provide a setting to clear the cache every 30 days or something, or if it reaches a user-designated size. The fact that I have free space isn't the point. I still don't want things taking up space when they shouldn't, especially since it used to be possible to clear those caches periodically from within settings.