Change the Voice & Accent of Spoken Text Selection in iOS

Oct 16, 2012 - 8 Comments

Change voice of Speak Selection in iOS

The default voice for speaking text in iOS is the same voice as Siri, but if you want to switch it up and hear something different you can change the text-to-speech voice quite easily. Switching voices is a bit more fun than you’d expect though, at least with English, because you end up with different accents as well. To get use out of this you’ll first need text to speech enabled in iOS, you can do that along the way if you haven’t enabled it yet:

  • Open “Settings” app and tap “General” then “Accessibility”
  • Choose “Speak Selection” (turn it ON if you haven’t yet), then tap “Dialects”
  • Tap to choose your new voice and accent

To check what the new voice sounds like, switch over to any app with text, tap and hold on a word or phrase, then choose “Speak Selection” to hear the new voice.

If you want your iPhone or iPad to sound exceedingly proper, it doesn’t get much better than the British English voice of Daniel. I’ve always been a fan of Australian accents so I went with Australian English, but all voice choices are very high quality. Obviously changing back to the default Siri voice is just a matter of choosing your primary countries language.

These voices can also be added to the Mac if you want to change things up there too, you’ll need any version of Mac OS X later than 10.7 to do so.

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Posted by: Paul Horowitz in iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks

8 Comments

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  1. muneer says:

    this is amazing information. i was searching accent changer on google and found it in my pocket ..thank you Steeve Jobs and thanks a ton OSXDAILY

  2. Diane says:

    I cannot get the voice to chg on my cell. I go to Settings, Accessability, Speech Nd Voices. I make my choice and it does not work! And I turn Speech Selection on!

  3. Don says:

    Where can I get a Boston accent voice? No, not a Dorchester Boston accent, but a middle class one like mine?

  4. Grace says:

    Hi, I’m on an iPad 3rd generation. I have turned on the speak selection and it doesn’t say ‘dialects”?

  5. James says:

    I’ve tried this for a long time now. I’m an American, but I love the British accent. However, the only problem is that half of the time when you choose a different accent (for English) it does not work properly. It does not recognize the words or phrases properly.

    • Don says:

      Researchers have tested this. Americans subconsciously find British voices more authoritative. Americans tend to be big Anglophiles.

  6. parakeet says:

    Tessa the South African, yea.

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