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.

Every 2 years, I give myself a little treat and buy a new phone....I'm pretty well pleased with the iPhone Xs! The OLED screen is nice, the new gestures, the larger screen, faster application launches, etc. etc...

I remember when I first went from a flip phone to an iPhone (it was a 3GS), how amazing it was compared to a flip phone! Then over the years, the incremental changes meant that the phones were faster, but not very memorable. This one though -- the new gestures, FaceID to replace TouchID, the larger screen in almost the same sized phone (I got the smallest of the 3 models) -- all of that has been a pleasure to use!

And I LOVED the setup! I just had to place the old iPhone next to the new one, and it transferred nearly all my settings! So much nicer than before! Here it is just after setup --





I thought I would miss TouchID, but FaceID is nice! It just have to look at the phone, and it unlocks. Here's the setup for that -- where I had to rotate my face to 'fill in the circle' a few times...



The new phone's chip is designed to allow some 'Augmented Reality', so I've been playing with an app that lets me examine artwork in my own home, lol! Here I am on my porch turning and zooming in on a piece of artwork from South America!