Any other Alison fans?

By PaulMartz, 24 March, 2024

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I absolutely love the Alison voice. With my hearing, Alison is by far the clearest and easiest voice to understand.

But Alison comes with a boatload of quirks. I've reported these to Apple, but in release after release, they remain unfixed. Here are two.

  • Alison pronounces 3 may like a date. So, in the sentence, "only 3 may attend," Alison says "only may third attend."
  • Alison always assumes and speaks the century for shorthand years, but fails to do it consistently. For example, '29 is spoken as 2029, but '30 is spoken as 1930.

Apple has made some progress. The word lax used to be pronounced as LAX, the airport in Los Angeles. But that's no longer an issue.

Alex has none of these problems. But Alison, and many other voices, seem to take liberties with the text, and as a result, they misrepresent the text to us users.

I wish Apple could fix these issues. Switching to Alex is not an option, at least not as far as my ears are concerned.

Options

Comments

By Holger Fiallo on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

Now that I am having issues with women voice, can not use her. Do like her. Now I am using Tom for my iPad and iPhone.

By Brian on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

Every time I hear the "Tom" voice, I'm reminded of the main 800 number for the United States Social Security administration.

Creepy! 😱

By Brad on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

As far as I understand it; these voices are old and aren't being updated anymore.

The older voices back in the 90s/2000s used to do things like that.

You could trhy phoning disability support directly and seeing where that gets you or emailing the head of the company, if that's an option, perhaps you could call him too? I'm not sure.

Unless Voiceover has a dictionary? You could try and make it so that the voice pronounces things the way you want through that?

By kool_turk on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

That's why spoonfeeding people with preset abbreviations isn't the way to go with text-to-speech.

I call it spoonfeeding because that's exactly what it is.

You don't see Braille users or sighted people having to deal with this. They have to figure out the abbreviations themselves or, nowadays, just ask a search engine.

That's what I do.

I use Fred, and even he abbreviates sometimes, like saying "gov" instead of governor on sites with a ".gov" extension.

Just read it as it is. If I want to know what something means, I'll look it up myself, instead of being treated like a small child.

By Brad on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

Along with older speach synths like that. I'm not exactly sure why it was done, perhaps they thought it would make things easier, who knows.

By Enes Deniz on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

The voices are made by Nuance and in fact, it has still been making the new Siri voices but is likely unwilling to update the old ones.
Note: Vocalizer for iOS does have some f*ctionary of its own that makes things so annoying and, in some cases, even challenging.

By TheBllindGuy07 on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

But just to let everyone know here so they can stop bashing apple for each and every bugs, all the bugs mentioned above are tied to Allison no matter what platform or screen reader she is on. All this problematic behaviours happens with nvda on windows as well in the exact same way.
As a side note, usually in real world nicely written text it would be written only three may attend anyway, not 3. :)
But yeah, the bug that after 30 characters all mixed capitalized word so frequent are messed up with voiceover on mac and ruins the coding experience with apple own api names are voiceover specific with at least that nuance voice I've tried so far.

By PaulMartz on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

I'm just a blind guy trying to figure out what text is on the screen, and I have no idea why selecting a different voice would cause VoiceOver to read text that's not actually present. I have no clue why all voices shipped with Apple computers aren't designed according to the same spec, because I know Apple has extremely tight specifications for other components.

If Apple's hands are tied because they outsourced these to some third party, then how would some naive user like myself determine who to raise these issues with?

By Country music fan on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

Just wanted to offer a suggestion. I find the Samantha enhanced quality voice is pretty easy to understand if you have it slow enough. Maybe that could be an option for you?

By PaulMartz on Saturday, March 23, 2024 - 20:19

Thanks for the suggestion of Samantha. In a quick test, yes, this voice is pretty clear, on par with Alison.

However, I hear the same reading mistakes I mentioned in the original post. If you don't experience these issues when using the Samantha voice, I sure would like to know how to customize it.