iOS 9.3 Bug - AVSpeechSynthesisVoice - Enhanced Quality Voice Is Not Enhanced in My App

iOS 9.3 on iPad Air 2

My app successfully obtains a reference to an enhanced quality voice (e.g. Daniel (Enhanced) for en-GB), but the speech produced when using this voice in the app is clearly not enhanced quality.


The debugger shows:


(lldb) po voice

[AVSpeechSynthesisVoice 0x124df1210] Language: en-GB, Name: Daniel (Enhanced), Quality: Enhanced


(lldb) po voice.identifier

com.apple.ttsbundle.Daniel-premium


So my app is definitely using the correct voice. But the audio is not correct - it sounds low quality (probably it's the default version of the same voice).


If I use the Speak Screen two-finger swipe in Safari using Daniel (Enhanced) as my default voice, I hear it as enhanced quality.

But in my app, the voice quality is not the same.

(My app has been working correctly for years on multiple versions of iOS so this is definitely an iOS 9.3 bug).

Has anyone else seen this issue or have a workaround?

Accepted Reply

The bug appears to be fixed in iOS 10. I confirmed by taking an iPhone 5 running iOS 9.3 and upgrading it to iOS 10 beta. Enhanced voices started working in my apps - didn't have to make any code changes; didn't even have to redownload the enhanced voices.

Replies

The same with French (Thomas). Our app plays only the default voice even if the enhanced version is on.

>...this is definitely an iOS 9.3 bug


You may want to add your bug report # to your thread for reference, thanks.


If you haven't yet filed one, do that and see what comes back.

Same with the Hungarian voice. In addition, while the name property properly contains the name of the voice: "Mariska", in VO/Speech settings, the Hungarian voice is called "Eszter". My observation is that the voiceWithLanguage method returns only one voice, but in 9.3 there are at least 2 voices / language are present if the user downoads the high quality voice.

English on 9.3.1 has this problem too. (Samantha Enchanced is nowhere to be found..)

Me too have the same problem with Kyoko, Japanese language.


Do you received answer by Apple about the bug 25379872?

This is supposed to be fixed in iOS 10, but I haven't been able to verify yet - still downloading the beta.

The bug appears to be fixed in iOS 10. I confirmed by taking an iPhone 5 running iOS 9.3 and upgrading it to iOS 10 beta. Enhanced voices started working in my apps - didn't have to make any code changes; didn't even have to redownload the enhanced voices.