AppleInsider Staff
New voice options included in iOS 7.1's latest developer preview make Siri's responses smoother and more lifelike for users in the U.K., Australia, and Japan.
The new voices — Â provided to AppleInsider by people familiar with the content of the update — Â compare favorably to their predecessors, lending Siri a more even tone and less stilted speech pattern. In keeping with Apple's intention to allow some international users to choose Siri's gender in iOS 7.1, both male and female voices were updated.
Apple similarly overhauled Siri's American voice in iOS 7's initial release, which also added a male option for the first time. Siri also gained the ability to control more features on users' devices, like opening apps and searching photos.
While no timetable for iOS 7.1's release has been made public, some are speculating that this may be the update's final beta release. A new report from BGR suggests that developers will soon receive a ready-for-release, or "gold master," build of the software with public availability to follow in early March.
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Chip Loder
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
28 Comments
The UK male voice sounds extremely realistic, like a recording (at least in the sample given). Speech recognition and synthesis has really improved in leaps and bounds over the last few years.
Translation of Japan female answer : "No!"
The Australian accents are awful.
I don't know if that's Apple's fault or my country's.
UK male is good. Brings us one step closer to Jarvis.
Japanese male should include Toshiro Mifune.
At last, a choice of gender for the UK voices: really good news. They do sound better too. I thought the Australian voices sounded a little more artificial, though they do have a reasonable Aussie accent (but I'll defer to a real Aussie on that :D)
[quote name="seanie248" url="/t/161893/first-listen-new-natural-sounding-siri-voices-for-the-u-k-australia-and-japan#post_2467520"]Translation of Japan female answer : "No!"[/quote] She said that she doesn't know the user's location because location services aren't available then indicates the user should activate location services. An authentic Japanese voice would never say "no."