Hi everyone,
I'm experiencing a strange issue that's even hard to describe. I'm a Persian speaker, and since Apple's built-in Persian voice called Dariush can't pronounce English words properly, I installed a third-party voice engine from the App Store called Speak NG, which you might be familiar with. I've currently set it as my active voice engine because it reads both Persian and English very well.
In VoiceOver settings under Speech, I’ve set the Primary Voice to Speak NG - Max with the language set to Persian. Since I want to be able to switch between different voices depending on the language I’m reading, I also added English under “Additional Languages” and selected Siri as the voice for English.
Here's the issue:
When I use the rotor (Control + Option + Command + Shift + Left/Right Arrows) to switch between voices, everything works fine until I move from the primary Persian voice to English (Siri). At that point, VoiceOver becomes completely silent and doesn’t say anything. I have to rotate back to Persian (Speak NG) to get it working again.
One more thing: I’ve set the macOS system language to Persian. Interestingly, if I remove Persian from system languages, Speak NG stops working entirely—even though it’s still installed. I have to ask a sighted person to re-add Persian so the voice starts working again.
I’d really appreciate any help or suggestions to fix this issue.
Thanks in advance!
By Babak, 27 May, 2025
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
Computer language is US English
Using operating systems and keyboard layouts in any language other than US English is bound to cause problems. Occasionally switching the speech synthesizer and keyboard layout to another language, like European Portuguese in my case, is fine, but defaulting to something other than US English and expecting functionality that is only used by a tiny minority to work properly is not going to result in a positive experience. Things are already pretty bad in US English, let alone in other locales.