Siri: Speech “To The Power Of” *HELP ME*

The answer given doesn’t work because I’m not having it read stuff I wrote, so I can’t change it. Not sure if you understood what is being said.

Example: It will read the following sentence:

I was irritated — no, I was furious

like this:

I was irritated to the power of no, I was furious

I don’t like it doing that, it makes it hard to understand what it is being read! It is supposed to pause like it would at a period.

Please please please fix it.

FOUND ONE SOLUTION

I’ve been having this problem for a month or two now (and upgrading the ios did not solve it).

I did just find one solution.

I changed the voice.

I switched to an English voice with a British accent (kate). It no longer says ‘the power of’…. 

I found 2 different settings for voice In my iPhone settings. I changed both, but I suspect it is the second one listed below that is the more important of the two. 

One was in Accessibility – Spoken Content (then select VOICES)

The other location was Accessibility – VoiceOver – Speech (then select VOICE).

Unfortunately – this did not correct my INSTAPAPER app, but it does see to have fixed it everywhere else….

Yes it seems to be working on kindle. I only tried the one British voice - KATE. It may work with other ones also.

Initially i had tried just switching to other voices with an American accent, and that made no difference.

I don’t necessarily want to listen to everything with a British accent but I’ll deal with it.

I am on hold with apple support now. I've actually spoken to 3 people today and none of them have any idea why this is happening or how to fix it. At this rate, hundreds of people need to report this issue so they see it's a bug and correct it in the next release.

They're telling me to do things like I caused this and I didn't. Reset Network settings? Come on, man. THis isn't a network issue. Sign out and sign back in... of my phone? Cause it's happening with every app.

I did switch my voice to Siri UK Male but I don't want everything read with a British accent.

I tried using different voices, and some of them don't say "to the power of", but I don't like any of those voices. So atm I'm listening to Ava and putting up with the issue. I guess I'll have to report it too.

So they told me to do a factory reset. Then restore the iPhone. So far that seems to have worked! For some reason the iOS update may not have installed right or something. The factory update is supplied to fix it.

Thanks. I switched to the Daniel voice and, thankfully, the annoying “to the power of” stopped. Unfortunately I’ll have to put up with the only slightly less annoying new voice. I hope Apple comes up with a more satisfactory fix soon!

I reported this problem, phone call was 50 minutes, absolutely NO Help & NO suggestions. I had to repeat everything I said 2-3 times to the Apple tech-he was NOT paying attention & offered NO solutions.

Apple never contacted me with any help-FIRE JASON-he was not even listening to me, it was very clear!

It is not just the —. It is also “ and “. It is not just in text that you type on the phone, it is text that you have your phone read from websites or emails or messages. So that can’t be fixed by adding a space after — us. (In any case, adding a space after an — is not always satisfactory.) In fact, this problem has been worse in the past weeks – initially it was only in what was typed on my iPhone, and now it includes what is in text on websites. It needs to be fixed, is it renders pointless the accessibility function of text to speech. Hard do imagine how an update could have been released by Apple without that having been caught.

When using the Apple News app, and having it read article text ("Select All", followed by "Speak"), the Em Dash (—) used in articles is read as "to the power of".

This appears to be a bug in the text-to-speech engine, and not something that can be fixed by modifying the article text. The Em Dash it used correctly in the articles and does _not_ feature a space character before or after the dash.

I'm running iOS 12.4.2 on my iPhone 6.

I've read reports that all of the US English voices have the problem, whereas the UK voices do not. Changing the voice from ENGLISH (US) "Siri Female" to ENGLISH (UK) "Kate (Enhanced)" fixed the issue for me. This change can be made using the Settings app: "General" > "Speech" > "Voices" > "English". I had to download the Kate voice data before I could select it.

I was able to get some relief from “to the power of” by going to accessibility settings > spoken content > pronunciations > “+” paste one of offending em-dashes and putting a single space in the say field. Also good for other annoying pronunciation errors.

I can't tell you how much I am enjoying reading other users' descriptions of their emotions over this issue, after six months of having no one to talk to about my own emotions, and if that sentence sounds crazy, it's because I am holding back a dam of emotion here so as not to get lost venting. I will only say that as I read these comments I am on pins and needles to know how this thread ends and if a solution has emerged or if the "nails on the chalkboard" are going to be allowed to remain how Apple treats users. God! how I would love to vent. Not venting. Not going to vent. Holding back the [emotion].

This workaround does provide some relief in my case. I am not quite able to avoid the mispronunciations of every instance of closed quotes, but I was able to avoid the mispronunciations in the instance of a closed quote followed by a space.

This is encouraging. I did a factory reset, which was a pain but it worked. Until the next update and it broke again. I'm not resetting my phone after every update so I hope this is the update that fixes the issue.

Solved!! Somewhat...Find in Settings>>Accessibility >>Spoken Content >>Pronunciation. Type ‘two dashes’ without a space in between: “—“ in the box for Phrase. Under Substitution I left blank with a few spaces. Not sure if the spaces make a difference but now she skips the dashes, as she should, when reading my e-books. Sometimes, you have to be your own hero- I am low key proud of myself!