Karmic-Dragonfly

iOS17 has a new accessibility feature, called Personal Voice, where it can give you a personal voice for speaking text that you type. I guess it’s for people that have lost their ability to speak well.

The voice is generated by AI, and you train it by reading 150 phrases. It got kinda tiresome by the 150th phrase!

I'm petty impressed with it.

It’s still pretty robotic sounding (as in a little bit like Stephen Hawking, RIP), but does have a lot of my own personal inflections and intonations in it! And I imagine that it will get better over time until it sounds more like the real person. I sent a message to some friends and family, and they can definitely hear 'me' in the AI generated voice.

All the processing and creation of the voice is done on the phone (I assume for privacy purposes), which means it takes several hours to finish creating it -- you basically leave your phone on charge overnight so it can create your voice. But now that I have it, I could use that voice anywhere I want to convert text to speech.

I would like to post a link here -- but I am really not sure yet what the privacy implications are of publicly posting a voice that sounds like a (robotic) me.

Fun day with H today having lunch and seeing an art exhibit! What better thing to do on a sunny, but cool Fall day, but to have lunch and walk to an art exhibit in an old train station with a friend?!


Found a recipe that uses an ingredient in my bar that I don't often use -- Elderberry Flower Liqueur. I found a recipe online that looked good, so I made it tonight. Not too bad at all! The sweet elderberry is counteracted by the bitter pomegranate juice, with the vodka providing a punch, and the wine sort of smoothing it all out...


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On a different topic, "Do Not Disturb" while driving came to iOS with the last update. There are various settings, but basically when the phone is connected to Bluetooth and you're moving fast enough, the phone goes into 'Do Not Disturb' mode to block distractions while you're driving.

Make sense. It sends 2 messages: 1 to say that I'm driving, and 1 to tell the other user how to override my setting (by replying with 'urgent'). Although 2 messages struck me as as 1 too many, and the messages are wordy, they basically do the job.

You know I use my devices in Portuguese so the messages are in Portuguese, so the messages defaulted to Portuguese. I found that I can edit the 1st message -- the one that tells the other person that I'm driving and will look at the message later. But I also found that I can't edit the 2nd message.

I decided to edit the 1st message since most of the people receiving the message are English speakers.

The effect on my phone is that the 1st message comes out in English and the 2nd in Portuguese!