What is everyone’s favorite voice voice to use?

Daniel default at 70

Hi, welcome to the website. My favorite voices are Karen premium Haned and regular at 50% Samantha enhanced and regular at 50% and Kait enhanced 50%. But I’ve also used a few other voices. I like superstar and 50% and that’s mostly what I use. I’ve kind of used a a bit of all over the voices occasionally but my main favorites are Karen Samantha Kait superstar. I don’t change the speaking right past 50%. But you’ll find out that there’s a lot of different voices and variance that you can choose from.

I find Samantha Compact to hit the perfect spot between robotized and natural voice, as well as to have the perfect pitch for pitch changing an octave both ways without becoming unintelligible at higher speech rates. As for actual numbers, my comfort zone with Samantha Compact is at 80% speech rate, but it's still mostly intelligible to me at 100%.

Yeah, the regular Samantha voice is pretty good. I definitely think that the regular voices in general are a lot better at handling change than any of the enhancement premium invoices. I’m not exactly sure why that is. I remember asking Apple about it and I think they said it’s something with the way that there’s more data that it’s required to store the larger files or something where it makes it a little harder for them to handle pitch change. I can’t remember exactly. It was something like that. I mean it kind of makes sense but it kinda doesn’t. You would think a higher quality would be good with pitch changing if they don’t they must get like more distorted when you change the pictures for some reason. Yeah regular voices are definitely better with paneling but changing. I definitely don’t put my speaking right past 50% because I just can’t process it any faster. What’s good with Samantha regular Samantha you don’t have to worry about getting deleted because it’s already preinstalled. That’s awesome.

Elequence, reed to be specific is my first choice, followed by alex.

i changed them around a lot for a while but i've just settled on this one

so i switch voices frequently. I have on my voices roter, Eloquence Reed, a cupple personal voices, which I have to rerecord, two from piper TTS, paul from Roona beta, and Alex.

I love these types of questions!

I had eloquence Reed for a while, but I recently switched to siri voice 4. I'll probably switch back eventually because of some pronunciation errors.

Also, I have eloquence reed at 75 percent. I have Siri voice 4 at 100 right now because I'm on the iOS 27 beta and it's way too slow at any other speed.

Which Siri Voice four are you using? There are three of those. There’s the US Voice four, there’s Australian voice, and there’s British voice for. Just curious, which one you’re using. I’ve tried to use some of the voices with voiceover, but there just seems to be a lot of issues with those. There’s a lot more lagging when you’re swiping the screen just to do navigation of the phone and there’s also a lot more of the phone like crashing and things like that that I’ve seen when I use any of those voices for voiceover so I just stopped doing it. I do have them downloaded just in case I feel like using them though. I mean it’s not as bad as it used to be back in iOS 16 when we had that screen curtain on every time you would be reading lots of text and voiceover would crash and go back to the top of what you were reading so at least that’s gone now, but yeah I’ll just stick to Samantha and Karen and superstar and Kait for now I guess. The thing is for me I like my voice voices to have names. The voices are just numbers that gets really boring for me. They need to have names at least within voiceover anyway.

Oh, good point, I use the U.S. voice 4. I love it but wish it didn't have these weird pauses when it reads long text.

Whichever voice I used, I bump against some kind of weirdness: misplaced inflection, weird pronounciation of some words which skips comprehension while continuously reading. I used Ava enhanced till 15, then something happened with 16 that made ava intolerable for me. Yes, we have options to adjust voice parameters, but tinkering with them I could not put myself to. So eloquence for me with 70 per cent speaking rate.

Yeah, you’re right. Something definitely happened to all of the voices in iOS 16. It’s almost like once we got more of them. The quality of the previous ones went down. I mean, I’m pretty sure Apple updated vocalizer. Whoever the company is now drivers and whatever they call back and we got all the rest of the voices that were available but something definitely happened to the quality of the voices once we got iOS 16. For example, I tried Tom enhanced today and he does this weird whistling thing whenever he says the word Settings now that he never used to do it before I iOS 16. So yeah, there’s definitely something up with those voices. And yes, the voice is always have some odd pausing when they read things. It’s kind of the other reason that I don’t use those voices for voiceover. I still have them just in case I feel like trying them again but for now I don’t really. As I’m writing this right now I am on my iPhone SE 2022 and I’m using Kait enhanced with British Voice three for Siri. I have all of the voices downloaded into both of my devices so I can just kind of switch around and try different things and experiment stuff like that so I’ve got plenty of them to play with. I guess I should say all of the English speaking voices as I really don’t know any other language to play with any other voices. So I have fun just kind of trying out a few different ones yes. But that’s the set up. I have for now on this phone and then on my primary device phone iPhone 15 I use Karen premium with British Voice one for Siri.

Eloquence I've used it since it was in the first beta I believe it came with iOS 16. That is all I'll use.

I don't remember when I started using the Samantha compact voice, maybe around iOS 17? As for speech rate, I run her between 65 and 70, just depends on the day. 🤷

Yes, that’s correct. Eloquence came with iOS 16. I’ve actually tried using it a couple times on the phone. I haven’t gotten used to the quality of it compared to Jaws. Although I have to say that it is a lot better now than it was when it first be available. So it’s slowly getting better I think. I kind of don’t even use eloquence. I’m Jaws anymore either though. I think it’s really cool that it’s available though because I know there were so many people who wanted went to their phone so that’s awesome that you guys finally got it. I really want the ability to be able to delete unwanted preinstalled voices from my device though. I don’t think it’s really cool that we’re told like which ones have to be installed. Yes we do have to have something installed because you need to speak to voice crashes out on you so I do understand that, but I do feel like there’s voices that I would want to delete. Like basically every novelty voice except for superstar is what I want to delete and for me personally. But like I said, I think it’s awesome that it’s available who wanted it. I would love to be able to delete certain eloquent voices too. There’s really only three that I like. Bobby, Glenn and Sandy. But on the phone, they’re called Sandy Eddie, and flow.

Now I am drying out just enhanced with South African Siri voice too. I like that so far. Because it has a very smooth quality to Voice. I’m still doing this on the iPhone SE 2022. I tend to do more reading with this device, so I’ll probably be switching around the Voice is more than that. I won’t come on here like every time I switch it, but I just thought this was kind of interesting Voice. I used it a long time ago and kind of forgotten about it but it’s nice.

Serena Premium for me. I don't love the voice but it's the one that has the least weird quirks and is clear and easy enough to understand. I have it set to 80%.

This is on my Mac and was on my phone. A little while ago I set my phone to use the Irish lady Siri. I really like the voice but she does have some really annoying ways of pronouncing things, like "punds is" instead of "pounds" or sometimes she will say things plural when they are singular. She's also not quite as clear as Serena. I dropped the rate to 70% and still find I don't catch as much as I used to. I need to go back to Serena but I've not been able to bring myself to do it yet.

I feel like a lot of the British female voices sound kind of old. I’m sure some younger sounding ones. No offense to anybody here of course. I also think there needs to be a bigger variety of them. There’s definitely way more American English Voice than there isn’t anybody else and that just kind of seems unfair. I feel like everybody deserves that much variety.

Same here. I try to mix it up from time to time, but I always come back to Reed because I grew up with JAWS so that's what I'm used to.

I totally get that. I understand people wanting to be using something that they grew up with. I actually did grow up with eloquence too. I just kind of got tired of it and as soon as we had the option to use vocalizer and jaws I did it. And then the same thing that happened with the phone I didn’t really feel like using eloquent anymore. I have tried it on the phone though. If I were going to use eloquence, I would be using British eloquent. It definitely seems clearer to me and then American eloquence. I actually did the same thing in jaws. I used the British accents. But I like any flow and Sandy or Jaws they were Bobby and Sandy Sandy. But yeah that makes a lot of sense. My first computer actually had Keynote gold. But I don’t know if we’ll ever get that for iOS. That would be pretty awesome.

I’m giving Alex a try right now and my iPhone SE 2022. He’s already crashed voiceover with the screen curtain on and I’ve only had him on there for a couple of seconds. If it keeps being a problem, I may have to try somebody else but I know a lot of people like this way so I’m just giving you a try again. It’s been a while since I’ve tried it.

Angélica, 70% Saludos desde México.

I just couldn’t get used to Alex. I’m back to Samantha enhanced. I’ll probably stick with that. It seems to be the one I can get the most used to. Karen and Samantha were always my favorite voices. They got a iPhone so a stick. To those.

I decided it’s just better to stick with the regular variance and everything. I don’t have to have any screen curtain on crashing bugs this way and won’t have any voices to delete themselves or anything like that this way I’m just taking the things that are preinstalled. So my iPhone SE 2022 is using regular Samantha and my iPhone 15 is using regular Karen. And I’m using American voice for Siri and both of them. When it does come time to update the iOS 27 I won’t have to worry about anything deleting itself. I’m talking for previous experiences. I had Karen premium when we went from. I was 18 to iOS 26 and that deleted itself and went back to Samantha since that’s the default Voice. So now this way in order to avoid any possible problems like that, I’ll just stick to voices that are already preinstalled in the operating system. And since luckily for me, my two favorites are preinstalled. I can just keep using those. I think it’s going to be so many rides available. I just don’t think the phones can quite handle them yet I’m sticking to the built-in invoices. I think it’s good if there’s so many varieties available I just don’t think the phones are able to handle them yet. I think it’s much simple to just have one of whatever voices they are. I just stick to those. I understand why they have to do this though, but that’s what I’m going to do with my personal devices.

For a good while, I was using Siri voice 4 (the US version) for everything, Siri and VoiceOver.
Then iOS 17 happened…
Needless to say, I do not use Siri voice 4 anymore for VO. I do still use it for Siri, of course. But have since gone back to Samantha compact for VO.
I don't know why Apple has to keep playing with voices. For a while, Siri voice 4 was awesome, and now I just can't use any of the enhanced or other voices. Even Alex is messed up these days.

Disclaimer, this would be an iPhone SE 2022, running iOS 26.6.1. I finally threw in the towel and upgraded.

eloquence is my favourite, speed at 75 %

Brian, I think you’re totally right about this. There’s definitely something up with the enhancing premium invoices for sure. That’s why I’m not using them anymore either. I’m using regular Samantha on my iPhone iPhone SE 2022 and I’m using regular on my iPhone 15. I’m using American voice for both devices. Because you’re right they’re totally something up with the voices when you try to use them. It’s like they just cannot handle it even just phone navigation. There’s so much lag when you try to do that. I did try that on SE phone so I totally know that. Yeah I think I’m gonna leave them like that for a while and see if there’s any kind of improvement at all. If not then I’m just gonna leave the regular Voice that I’ve been using. Yeah there’s definitely something definitely up with enhanced. Alex sounds really weird right now too. I don’t have a Mac to compare him too, but he definitely sounds kind of distorted or something. That’s what it is. All of the enhanced premium Voice have some kind of distortion issue going on. Although honestly, I think they started with iOS 16. She hasn’t gotten better. So here I am back to regular Karen and regular. Samantha.