griffd2004
Level 1 (13 points)
Desktops

Q: Two issues with Siri on macOS Sierra (voice quality and contact card)

I'm having several issues with Siri on macOS Sierra...

 

1) The voice is of low quality. I know that when you first upgrade, you get the low quality voice until it has had a chance to download the high quality voice, but I've waited a week and even re-installed macOS several times, and I still get the low quality voice. Even if I change voices in the System Preference. I have macOS Sierra installed on my Macbook w/retina, and the voice quality is infinitely superior. Does Apple water it down on older macs? I'm sure my 4-core i7 is plenty capable to use the highest-quality voice.

 

2) When I ask it to show my address, or ask who my brother or finance is, it gets confused, as if it can't read my contact card properly. The same exact contact card works fine on iOS 10. I tried turning off Contacts in iCloud settings, and re-enabled it so it would re-download, but it continues to report partial information from the card. For example, for addresses, they come up as OTHER and only show the city and state, even though I have a full home address listed. I logged out and logged in as my fiancee, and hers is working fine.

 

Thanks,

Dave

 

Message was edited by: griffd2004

MacBook Pro, macOS Sierra (10.12), Mid 2012

Posted on Sep 26, 2016 10:48 AM

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griffd2004

Q: Two issues with Siri on macOS Sierra (voice quality and contact card)

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  • by griffd2004,

    griffd2004 griffd2004 Sep 26, 2016 2:11 PM in response to griffd2004
    Level 1 (13 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 26, 2016 2:11 PM in response to griffd2004

    Just a quick update  - after deleting my contact, re-assigning a new contact using "Make this my contact" (which seems buggy btw - doesn't seem to stick) reinstalling macOS Sierra twice, disabling iCloud, toggling off and on Contacts and Siri, etc etc, turns out, it was using a contact card from my Google account (??), even though I only had "Calendar" selected in my Google account. I deleted Google from my list of Internet Accounts in System Preferences (as well as some others), and now it is  using the new card I created under iCloud. It's weird that it'd be giving so much priority to my Google account over my iCloud account, especially since I don't even have Contacts enabled?

     

    Still need to figure out why the high-quality voice won't download.

  • by griffd2004,

    griffd2004 griffd2004 Sep 28, 2016 3:31 PM in response to griffd2004
    Level 1 (13 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 28, 2016 3:31 PM in response to griffd2004

    I figured it out!!! It has to do with your App Store System Preferences. I had all the checkboxes under "Automatically Check for updates" disabled ,including "Install System Data Files and security updates". This is to avoid any surprise bills when I'm tethering with my phone. Well, it turns out, when this is disabled, it won't download the voices from Apple's CDN (example URL: http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/06/40/031-72924/0p9g9iuul9uaojp42eatzq4 b3zr38r4dgw/CustomVoice_en_GB_martha.pkg) I haven't narrowed it down to this one checkbox, but I'm pretty sure it's the culprit. After enabling it, i toggled Siri off and on a couple of times and watched the console - finally it downloaded and installed the voices and placed them in System/Library/Speech/Voices . You can keep an eye on System/Library/System/Library/Receipts to see when it actually installs the voices. Mystery solved.

     

    Apple really needs to add a warning message or an override when you enable Siri if it's not going to be able to provide the high quality voice. It took hours of real digging to figure this out.