iPhone can mimic your voice in 15 minutes

Apple has unveiled a new feature that allows the iPhone to mimic your own voice. The feature is part of a series of new features for users with disabilities.

Apple devices have been well equipped with features for users with disabilities for years. The company is now announcing new functions such as the Live Speech text-to-speech feature. In addition, users who have difficulty or cannot speak can have typed text spoken. For example, they can still make phone calls or participate in FaceTime calls.

Realistic stem in 15 minutes

By default, Live Speech uses one of Apple’s Siri voices, but the company is going a step further. It is also possible for users to use their own voice for the reading function. The Personal Voice option mimics users’ voices.

They then have to read certain words for fifteen minutes. Then machine learning on the iPhone or iPad gets to work to create a computer voice that sounds exactly like the user – without that personal voice coming online. The feature will only work in English.

For example, the speech function can be valuable for users with a progressive muscle disease such as ALS. Then you slowly but surely lose your ability to speak, but with Personal Voice you make a digital backup of your voice, as it were. “Being able to tell someone you love them in a voice that sounds just like you makes all the difference in the world,” says Philip Green of the ALS nonprofit Team Gleason.

iPhone as an eye for the visually impaired

More new features have been announced by Apple. The existing Magnifying Glass app is being expanded with a function that reads texts that users point to. This can be useful for the visually impaired, who can, for example, still see the buttons on the microwave, but not the text. This function also does not initially work in Dutch.

There will also be modified versions of the Messages, Camera, Photos and Music apps. They get larger buttons and less information on the screen. This makes it easier for people with a cognitive disability to use such apps.

Later this year

The new features will be added to iOS, iPadOS, and macOS “later this year.” Presumably these are the major new versions of those systems.

Other new features are expected at the WWDC developer conference. It will be held in the week of June 5, with the well-known keynote on that day in which Apple makes new announcements, which may include the long-awaited mixed reality glasses.