Your IPhone Can Clone Your Voice

Live Speech is a powerful new accessibility feature introduced in iOS 17 that will speak aloud whatever you type. It works on phone calls, FaceTime calls, and private conversations—anytime you need your iPhone to speak for you. There are many voices to choose from, but only your own can be the best.

Personal Voice is the other side of this Live Speech feature, which uses artificial intelligence to “clone” your voice based on the long series of recordings you make during setup. You can then use this likeness wherever you can use live speech, so your iPhone’s speech will sound like your own.

I can think of many frivolous uses for this technology, but Personal Voice is more than a gimmick to annoy others. According to Apple, this feature will allow “users who are at risk of losing the ability to speak, to create a voice similar to their own.” This way, anyone in the early stages of ALS or who has other vocal cord problems will be able to keep their voice (in a sense). (The late film critic Roger Ebert tested a rudimentary form of this technology over a decade ago, and his wife’s reaction to his speaking again after cancer robbed him of his voice speaks loudly enough about how meaningful progress really is.)

Even if you’re not in immediate danger of losing your voice, you never know what life will bring, so you can start while you can still speak clearly.

How to clone your voice with iPhone

The “active” part of setting up Personal Voice on your iPhone probably won’t take more than half an hour, but it will take a few hours of passive processing when you can’t use your device at all, so maybe wait until you go to bed to do the following:

• Install iOS 17. Personal voice will be added to your phone when the iOS 17 update rolls out in September, but you can take it early by installing the public beta . Open your phone and go to Settings > General > Software Update > Beta Updates and select the iOS 17 public beta. Follow the steps to install the beta.
• Once the update is complete, open Settings .
• Click “Accessibility”, scroll down to “Personal Voice” and click “Create a Personal Voice” . Choose a name for your personal voice and click OK .
• You will be prompted to check the sound quality. Once this is dealt with, you will be asked to read about 150 lines of text, which may take some time.
• Once you’ve finished reading your lines, you’ll need to leave your phone locked and connected to power while the AI ​​does its thing. Why not eat a banana? This may take up to 10 hours.
• You may need to reboot to make sure everything is ok.

Using Personal Voice on iPhone and iPad

When the voice is ready, you can access it in Settings > Accessibility > Live Speech . Make sure Live Speech is enabled, then make sure your voice is selected in the “Voices” section. You can even add Featured Phrases if you need quick access to things you want to say often. You can also share this voice on compatible devices so you don’t have to repeat the steps so you can access your voice on your iPad as well.

When everything is set up, you can access your personal voice by triple-clicking the side button or the Home button and then pressing Live Speech. Here you can tap on the keyboard to type whatever you want your iPhone to say or choose any of your preset phrases.

You’ll be able to read FaceTime text and regular calls with your voice using iOS 17’s Live Speech feature, or have your phone read your text aloud in real life so you don’t have to actually talk to people at the grocery store. Anything you enter into this function can be spoken.

The possibilities for a personalized voice are endless if you speak English. This feature is currently not available for other languages.

How secure is Personal Voice on iOS?

I can imagine nightmarish scenarios where scammers download my voice without my permission and use it to call my mom and ask for bail money or something like that. However, Apple claims that “Speech Accessibility uses on-device machine learning to keep users’ information private and secure.” We’ll have to take their word for it.

This article was updated on Thursday, August 10th. The previous version incorrectly stated that you can use Personal Voice as your Siri voice.