Guys, I'm having a very peculiarly intreiguing problem with my mac and the latest build, not the beta, this is the official release, of Big Sur V11.2.3 and the American English Siri male. This system was not upgraded from Catalina. The first OS that the drive ever had on it was 11.2.3. Catalina's never touched this system.
I'm noticing first of all, the siri male voice sounds completely different than on Catalina. The inflection is completely different. I'm not talking about the compact voice. I mean the full high quality voice.
Regardless compact or high quality, and regardless the male or female US english voices, I can't through the Voiceover Utility, nor through the method of hitting VO+Command+Shift up down left and right arrows seem to move the speaking rate. I literally bumped it all the way down to 10 percent, and all the way up to 100 percent, and hear absolutely no difference. I can definitely move the rate no problem. It's just that audibly, nothing is happening.
Now, you do that with Alex, either compact or high quality, or any of the other voices, it works correctly. It seems to only be these two Siri voices.
Just out of a hunch, I went into system prefs, Accessibility, then under vision, and I set the system voice to Siri Male, and tried moving the speaking rate in there while also making sure that under the Voiceover utility on the general category, I had the box for allow to be controled by Apple script checked. That didn't help either.
I know this problem isn't existing if you came from Catalina, then through Software Update you update to Big Sur, but before updating, you had the Siri voices.
It seems like this only happens if you do a clean install, or if you never had Catalina to start with.
Even if this really isn't your preferred voice of choice, if you're willing, and have either a system which came with Big Sur, or did update, but when you did so, you erased your drive and installed clean, if you did either, would someone please be willing to test this for me, and let us know what results you encouterencounter? Does it work for you after downloading the two voices, or do you also seem to not be able to move the rate on either of them?
Thanks.
Comments
Similar issue
Hi,
I am facing similar issue with my British male/female and American male/Female Siri Voices. I have also tried to see whether other Siri voices have this peculiar issue, except the Irish male/female voices, the issue persists.
I tried removing Siri voices from the system directory and reinstalling them, repeatedly, no joy, though.
I am a tad frustrated as I prefer to use British Siri male voice as my primary VO voice.
Let me know if you all can come up with something.
Cheers!
So I'm not crazy then?
Wow! Well, at least I then know I'm not crazy. I thought maybe this system was having a freak attack and being itself. I spoke to Apple Accessibility, and they are claiming that this is normal, that the Siri voices are real actual human voice samples, and that trying to increase or decrease the speaking rate would alter the sample rate, bit rate, and over all make the formance sound God aweful! That's why they don't allow you to change it. They said it is the same with pitch. You can't alter the Siri voices pitch either regardless what language or dialect you use. Frankly, I'm not sure how much I believe all of that, but ok, whatever. Quite frankly, I didn't have the patients to argue. I know that's probably not altogether correct. Maybe some of it is, but I guarantee you these are not real life human sampled and cacatinated voices. Now the Vocalizer voices? That's another story, but even those you can change and they still sound ok when you do. So what the hell! If anyone finds a work around, I'd be curious.