Yep, I will do that if the female voice doesn't download sometime soon. The male one has already tho so I would think the other would eventually download ...
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Low quality Siri voice?
- Thread starter JerTheGeek
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I'm on Beta 5 and the enhanced voice also doesn't seem to download, regardless of how much I switch the language and gender back and forth, let it idle with the power connected, or reboot it.
It's on a good network - the enhanced voice takes about a minute to download on my iPhone. Oh well, probably a beta glitch.
It's on a good network - the enhanced voice takes about a minute to download on my iPhone. Oh well, probably a beta glitch.
i can confirm that on ios 10 pb4 siri's enhanced voice is back also on macOS sierra pb4... it was so ****ing annoying to hear siri's unpolished accent >.<
You were always able to manually download higher quality voices, and you still can. It's just moved to the (somewhat hidden) Accessibility preferences now.
If you want to force the download, in the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, select Speech and then under System Voice choose Customise. There should be a checkbox already ticked that says "Upgrade to enhanced quality". Pressing OK will then force the download. If you don't see the checkbox it means it's already upgraded or there's no higher quality version for the selected voice in your language.
In my case it was a 413 MB download. Apple obviously can't bundle all the high quality voices with macOS or it would massively blow out the installer size. Most people only use one voice so it makes sense to make it a post-install download to get the high-quality version.
If this fixes a low-quality Siri voice on new install for you let us know. I'm not certain if this is the fix or whether Apple has a different "medium quality" voice but I figured downloading the high-quality version would do the trick.
If you want to force the download, in the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, select Speech and then under System Voice choose Customise. There should be a checkbox already ticked that says "Upgrade to enhanced quality". Pressing OK will then force the download. If you don't see the checkbox it means it's already upgraded or there's no higher quality version for the selected voice in your language.
In my case it was a 413 MB download. Apple obviously can't bundle all the high quality voices with macOS or it would massively blow out the installer size. Most people only use one voice so it makes sense to make it a post-install download to get the high-quality version.
If this fixes a low-quality Siri voice on new install for you let us know. I'm not certain if this is the fix or whether Apple has a different "medium quality" voice but I figured downloading the high-quality version would do the trick.
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Thanks for this. It did make female Siri high quality through the internal speakers of my MBP but not when outputting to my bluetooth speaker. Maybe it's a bluetooth issue, but it's strange that it's high quality via bluetooth when I choose male.
I'm not sure which voice Siri uses for you, but for my setup (Australia) the Siri voice is the same as the default Speech voice...which is Karen (Female Australia).
If you can find the Siri voice for you in that list upgrading to the enhanced quality version should do the trick?
I downloaded the high quality voices for Karen but Siri still refuses to use it. I've rebooted and toggled from the male to female. Like others have said, the male one works fine. But not the female...
UPDATE: She eventually started speaking in a non robotic voice. Just had to be more patient.
UPDATE: She eventually started speaking in a non robotic voice. Just had to be more patient.
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Siri only opens new unread messages for me when I ask for a specific person and then asks if I want to reply. If I ask to open messages, all messages come up.
If anyone else comes looking for this solution, here was mine: i checked (enabled) "Download newly available updates in the background" in the App Store System Preferences (not install!), waited a while (noticed softwareupdated was present and active in Activity Monitor), then toggled Siri on and off, swapped to another language and then back to American English. After this fiddling (the same on two machines with the poor quality voice), i now have the correct high-quality Siri voice.
It seems Apple expects automatic updates to be enabled and has tied system component downloads to this function.
EDIT: i found this solution on some other site where people were complaining about the same problem. i didn't take note of the site and cannot find it in my extensive internet history, or i'd point to it here.
It seems Apple expects automatic updates to be enabled and has tied system component downloads to this function.
EDIT: i found this solution on some other site where people were complaining about the same problem. i didn't take note of the site and cannot find it in my extensive internet history, or i'd point to it here.