Unspeakable text

This is a known bug so it cannot be turned off.

I see this whenever I do a restart. I have on the lock screen Weather Gods and voice memo. It refers them as unspeakable English. This started in iOS 27.2 in the beta 2. It continues.

I see this while browsing the Braille Superstore‘s website. You’ll go and look at it product you’re interested in and then the image I think is where the English unspeakable English thing is coming from. It seems to coincide with a possible image description. It seems to be something where it’s not instead of reading an image it’s reading that. Crazy bug. Hey look at least Apple’s aware of it. They will get it resolved.

unpronounceable text or unpronounceable english text. I honestly thought maybe it was just me because i am using clasic samantha from iOS4 and maybe it was the bugged sinth, butt i guess for me it was just the crazy ttiming, i started using this sinth as i updated to 27.2

Oh yes, the unpronounceable bug was obnoxious. This is kind of a similar idea. And it does not seem to be limited to a voice you’re using. I’m using Catherine enhanced on my iPhone SE 2022. I’m using Martha enhancer on my iPhone 15. And they’re both exhibiting this behavior. Yeah Apple will resolve but we just have to keep reporting it.

It’s defenetly quite annoying. The parcial workaround I can think of that could work maybe, whatever it says, coppy it to the clipboard and add it in pronunciation and set to ignore. I've no idea if this will work but just an idea. Hopefully this gets fixed soon though because annoying doesn't do this justice.
Although, from what I have found, this seems to have something to do with particular emojis I think. Or maybe labeled elements or something similar. I say this because in my whatsapp the chat which reads, unspeakable unknown text is a group which before and after the name has some sort of, spiral emogy simble or at least, that's how it was described to me. Other chats? Read normally.

I had this idea, and sadly, it doesn't work. Since it mostly happens, at least for me, when using Discord and some other social apps, I think it has something to do with emojies or other graphics that the sites use to represent different areas of the site. I was really hoping Apple would get their act together and fix it in iOS 27.2, but sadly, that didn't happen, so I really, really hope that it will be fixed in the next update. It almost makes certain apps so tedius to navigate that it's almost not worth bothering with them.

Yes, this bug is very annoying. At least unpronounceable was one word you kind of just skipped past it. This thing says unspeakable English text. You would think that three words wouldn’t be as big of a deal, but it’s actually more annoying. It really interrupts the flow of anything you’re doing.

TLDR I believe that after all the noise of the indian language problem, apple found nothing better than add a condition in VO that anything not native to that tts language is flagged as such even if the tts can technically speak it. So not only do we get unspeakable text with any weird utf8 symbol, but we have also lost the ability for vo to read unicode braille dots characters which it was perfectly fine with before. Now when I get anything punjabi it says unspeakable text any time it sees that wile before it would just read the next text.
Very annoying indeed.

I don’t know what symbols this has while it’s occurring, but I have definitely had it say unspeakable English text on any websites that I’m reading something on maybe where there’s an image or something And look I’ll just say the detective languages feature in iOS has never ever worked properly for me. It’s never honored. So if I turn it off, it will still try to speak another language, but also if I put it on 802 so the setting is never honored. It’s stupid and I’ve had a problem with it since I was 13 three something. It says in the explanation that Voice will always speak with the current voice if the feature is off, but guess what that doesn’t happen for me ever I never has so yeah this is an ongoing bug probably related to the unspeakable English text thing. Oh the other great one is the unpronounceable. That’s not as bad because it’s one word. Hearing unspeakable English text when you’re trying to browse a website is so freaking annoying. I wonder if the words unspeakable English checks even come up on the screen visually? Does anybody know?

CELA is the Canadian library site, not unlike BARD, I suppose. It's very annoying to have to wai wait for several seconds to hear if your finger landed on the search link while Voiceover stumbles its way through "unspeakable English."

Unfortunately, still a problem in iOS 27.3. I actually found one website unuseable earlier because it was saying that so much

So i've experienced this when I know there are emojis in Whatsapp messages, which used to read fine. These are historic messages, so I can compare before and after as I know the content well.

I'm also experiencing it on my Apple TV, usually during a listing of a TV series or Movie, so it's not just confined to IOS or MacOS sadly...

It would be curious to see how many VO users are there in the world, and, if can Apple release a 27.2.1 to fix this issue on priority.
I bet that number runs at least till 50K if not 100K users across the world. That's 100 Million dollars assuming Average iPhone cost around 1000 dollars.
Seriously, it's high time Apple separated VO updates from IOS, I know it's deeply integrated and yada yada. But, waiting for an entire OS update to fix my screen reader seems very inconvenient. How on earth these things aren't modular and updatable via App-store. Google does this with Talkback, through Android Accessibility suite and via Play Store.

I am experiencing similar announcements on an iPhone 15 Pro, although I cannot confirm that the underlying cause is the same. I first noticed the problem with iOS 27.0, and it persists on the iOS 27.3 developer beta I am using.

I use the Russian Milena voice with Detect Languages turned off because I want one consistent voice to read all content, including Russian mixed with English. At certain symbols or separators, VoiceOver inserts messages saying that English, Greek, or an unknown language is not supported. For example, focusing the SmartAlex course continuation card labelled “ПРОДОЛЖИТЬ · UNIT” triggers the unsupported-English-language announcement.

Changing voices and languages did not help. Reviewing my custom labels did not reveal a cause. Today I used Reset VoiceOver Settings, confirmed Russian Milena, turned Detect Languages off again, and tested the same card: the announcement remained. Resetting VoiceOver did not resolve the issue.

I have sent Apple Accessibility a report with two video recordings and a follow-up describing the unsuccessful reset. On my Mac, I do not experience this problem with comparable VoiceOver settings.

Has anyone received a confirmed response from Apple about this specific issue, or found a working solution that preserves a single voice with Detect Languages turned off?

I am seeing this in the Amazon Prime app (ios 27.2). If I open up a movie, for example, it says"unspeakable text included with amazon prime". When I copy it to clipboard and paste on my Mac, the unspeakable text looks like a comma:
" , Included with Prime"

Not sure if this is a weird unicode comma that gets translated to a regular one during copy and paste.

Unspeakable Korean language.

I couldn't spel Korean for the life of me and kept getting the wrong langauge in google, so I literally wrote, kuh re yun language and it worked! That's amazing to me and funny too.

Does anybody know if this text line is displayed visually, or just spoken my voice? Because if I have to hear it say unspeakable English text one more time I don’t know what I’m going to do. Report it to Apple, probably? I don’t know what they’ll have me do to troubleshoot it, but I’m willing to try to find out just for the pure entertainment of it. But I can come back here and tell you my experiences.

They really need to fix this. It's super duper annoying. I guess the only thing we can do is send reports to apple accessibility until they fix it.