Pro Tip: How to improve text-to-speech voice quality on iOS

Did you know that you can improve the voice quality on iOS? It is really simple and takes about 2 minutes to do! To start, open your Settings app, and go to Accessibility > Read & Speak > Voices (Accessibility > Spoken Content > Voices on versions older than iOS 18). From here, you can listen to many different voices.

Which voice should I pick?

For the best voice quality, you should select the "Premium" voices. If such a voice is not available, you can select an "Enhanced" voice, which—despite the fact that it will be lower quality than the "Premium" voices—will still be an improvement over the standard robotic voices. Once you have chosen a voice, click to download it! A good option for American English is Ava (Premium).

Caveats

Because our method to use these higher quality voices is more of a workaround, there are some caveats. First, you cannot have more than one "Premium" or "Enhanced" voice downloaded at the same time. Even if you update the voice selection in Settings, it will not reflect in the app until you remove the old voice (which you can do by swiping left on the name). This does not affect multiple languages, so if you have an "Enhanced" voice in both English and Spanish, the app will correctly use the "Enhanced" voice in both languages. Second, you cannot use the Siri voices (i.e. voices starting with "Siri Voice" in their names). We cannot access the Siri voices for text-to-speech. These two caveats are a result of the method this workaround uses, and cannot be rectified until Apple provides a way to access these higher quality voices without resorting to workarounds. Until then, this method must be used to ensure that you have access to the highest quality text-to-speech voices that iOS provides.