Can't download English U.S. Siri voices for VoiceOver

By Kostadin Kolev, 6 May, 2025

Forum

iOS and iPadOS

Hello,

I'm trying to download the English U.S. Siri voices for VoiceOver, but it fails. The download progress remains at 0%. If I try to download the English U.K. Siri voices, they download and install successfully.

I'm trying this on an iPhone 13 with iOS 18.4.1. The region is set to "Bulgaria" and the phone's language is set to "Bulgarian". Siri is not configured, since it does not support the Bulgarian language.

Here's how I'm trying to download the voices: I go to Settings -> Accessibility -> VoiceOver -> Speech -> Add a voice to the rotor -> English -> English U.S. -> Siri and I click on one of the 5 available voices. None of them succeeds to download and install.

Any ideas what's going on?

Thanks in advance. 🙏

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Comments

I’m having similar issues

I am having issues with the Indian English voices. All of the other Siri voices seem to work for me except the Indian English ones.

What you are doing is for siri as a voiceover TTS

For siri as a service, you need to go to settings, siri and from there, you have to select the language and voice.

That's what I need them for …

That's what I need them for - for VoiceOver and not for the Siri assistant.

Then reset all settings

You will find that under general

Problem seems to be solved for me

I don't know if it is due to something fixed on their servers or it was fixed on the device after the update to iOS 18.5.0, but now I've can download the English U.S. voices. At least the first one - I haven't tried with the others, but I can take a guess that they will work now as well.

So, for everyone that like me had trouble downloading Siri voices for use with VoiceOver, try it now (specially after updating to iOS 18.5.0).

Vocalizer voices and privacy-enhancing name servers

I don't particularly like any of the Siri voices because last I checked their quality diminishes significantly at higher speech rates, so I always stick to the Samantha Compact voice, which I think is also the default on macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS. As for the downloads not making progress, and assuming that you are using third party name servers like Google's or CloudFlare's, I strongly suggest switching to your Internet provider's name servers because third-party name servers that attempt to hide your location can also accidentally make Content Delivery Networks provide you with sub-optimal server addresses, and those may geo-block connections to reduce the chance of successful denial of service attacks. Not saying this is the case, just that there's a chance it might be.

Just noticed that the problem is fixed for you, and also remembered that some people were reporting an Apple service outage earlier on reddit, so that could be the reason.

Edit: Corrected the spelling of CloudFlare.

Edit 2: Changed formatting to Markdown and added the second paragraph about Apple's earlier outage.

I have not had that happen before

Can download siri voices... sort of

I'm able to download the US English siri voices on my iPhone 16. However, the new Siri voice 4 will not download for Voiceover no matter what I do. It's not a huge deal, so it's not like I'll take any super drastic steps to make it work, but I'm just curious if it's even possible to use that new voice for voiceover.