Hi all,
so this may be a strange question and the answer is probably obvious, but how exactly do you control which voices appear in the VoiceOver languages rotor with VO command shift and arrows?
I open the VoiceOver utility, choose speech, make sure the voices tab is selected, and scroll right to customise languages.
There is a languages table. If I interact with it, I have English and Czech in the list, which is completely fine and is what I selected. However, when I go through the voices rotor and try to switch Voices, I have Automatically select based on language, Alex, Ava, Ava compact, Daniel compact (English UK ), Fiona compact (English Ireland ), Iveta ( Czech voice I chose ), Karon compact (Australian English ), a bunch of Siri voices as well as Tessa (English south african ) and Moira (English Ireland ).
Anyway, point being, I'd love to have only a few voices such as Alex, Ava, Karon and the Czech one I choose and in general be able to customise the list. So, the logical thing I did now is go and press the edit button next to English. There, I have the choice of changing my default voice, its rate, pitch and such, as well as additional voice options, which only seems to allow changing different voices for different contexts.
So I exit out of there, and instead click on the voice option. That opens up a menu with a list of different voices, as well as a customise item at the bottom, which I press.
This finally opens up a list of voices I can check and uncheck. Problem? In this list, voices such as Karon or Daniel are unchecked, nevertheless they are clearly present in the Voiceover speech rotor.
Thus, my question. What controls which voices appear and which don't? Where are you supposed to adjust that, and why is this 5 times more unnecessarily complex than it is on iOS? Did I miss a completely different section of the VoiceOver utility related to this rotor and is the speech tab a wrong part to look at?
Thanks for any help
Comments
Suggestion
Did you edit the list in the Czech voices too? The English voices may appear too in the list of non-English voices.
it appeared to be a glitch
hello,
great idea, sadly that wasn't a problem either.
What I ended up doing is going through all the voices that I don't want, and even though they were unchecked, I would go into the language and check the voice, then uncheck it again.
This removed every voice that was there, but changes weren't reflected in the rotor until I actually turned VoiceOver off and back on, making me assume at first that even this didn't work.
After restarting VO though, now I'm able to have only the voices I need.
Checking each language
Thanks for this topic, Nikola. I especially want to remove the non-compact voices from my list, as they just slow everything down.
When you say that you went into each language an dthen checked and unchecked it, what is it you do?
I pick a language from the picker, and then it gives me all the possible settings for it, but I can't find a way of checking / unchecking it.
What did you do to achieve this?
Thanks
Dyfrig
re: checking and unchecking languages
Hello there,
when I talk about checking and unchecking, it is related to each voice in a given language. For example, if you open VoiceOver utility, go to the speech tab, and then interact with the languages table, you will see all your languages. For each one, you will have a button called voice, voice name, where voice name is the name of the voice selected for that language. This is the button you want to press, no matter which language. Pressing that button opens a popup menu with voices available, and at the bottom, there is an option called customise...
This is the option you want to activate. This will open a completely new dialog, where you will have a table with all available languages and voices, but each voice will be a checkbox. Unchecking a voice should definitely remove it from the speech rotor, hence why I called this process strangely confusing and unintuitive.