Apple Watch series 6 Siri voice won’t change

Following this other discussion thread too; I'm afraid there's no solution there either as of today, but worth keeping an eye if there one's posted. Although the poster's complaining about the voice used when asking the watch to speak the time it seems routed in this same problem of the Siri voice downloading, not applying successfully, deleting, and then repeating.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251845629?login=true&page=1

This won’t help you at all, but it’s driving me mad.

I’ve had the female voice ever since Siri first started. It’s fine.

Today, for no reason at all that I can see, it has changed to a male voice. I do not want a male voice.

I’ve searched everywhere to see how to change it and all the examples are typically out of date because they show an option to change the voice which no longer appears in settings.

To say I’m irritated as an understatement.

What I have observed so far is that the watch is not able to download the female British voice.

I put the watch in Airplane Mode and turned on WiFi so that the watch had a good internet connection. I then put the watch on its charger and went to the Siri voice setting and selected the female British voice and watched the download percentage that is displayed at the bottom of the screen. After it got to 100%, I went back to the watch face and put two fingers on it so that it would say the time in Siri’s voice. It was a male voice. I went back to the setting and the download started all over again. Frustrating.

I was on the phone with Apple tech support for about two hours today. Because I work in software and hardware development, I was able to give them a lot of useful information in regards to this bug. The summarized version of our conclusion is that we will have to wait for a patch to fix it. I wish that I had better news.

From what I have observed, in regards to the Siri British voice, there is a default voice that is a more computerized sounding one that comes wit the watch. When you select a British voice, the watch downloads one that sounds more natural for the sex that you select. My watch downloaded each of them but was not able to apply them. It reverts to the default male computerized voice and starts the downloads all over again when you select them.

For the Indian female voice, always reverts to a male Indian voice as well.

My watch does the same thing with the American voice, but the change in voice is not as discernible, and the sex stays female when selected. So the average user will not notice.

Can confirm I'm experiencing a similar bug with siri voice. I've noticed that my battery has been draining on my iphone and the main culprit was Siri, which I never use. After many hair pulling incidents trying to figure what the heck was going on, I discovered that the siri voice on my series 6 said waiting to download as well as dictation under keyboard settings. Just stuck on waiting to download. After toggling the voice options the voice would download and battery life for a few hours would get better. Then bam it would hit and I would watch it drop again and low and behold, siri the culprit again.

Check my watch, siri voice showing waiting to download again! This cycle is non stop. I would put back on charger, the voice would download, works fine for a few hours them bam - waiting to download yet again.

I've just disabled siri on my watch this morning and will monitor what happens but something in the firmware is definitely broken. Hope this gets fixed soon!

I have the same problem on my new Series 3 running WatchOS 7.1. It seems to be related to the Watch not being able to download and apply the enhanced Siri language pack native to your region. In my case I’m set to UK region and the watch is trying to download the British Female Siri language. Without it Siri works with the internet-supported non-enhanced version of the Siri voice, and VoiceOver (and two-finger speaking clock) uses the Daniel voice. Every day during charging it successfully downloads the Siri pack, but then quickly deletes it, and the process repeats the following day.

As a trial I’ve set the Siri to American Female instead. This has successfully downloaded and applied, and uses the enhanced voice for both Siri and VoiceOver. However, iOS (and seemingly WatchOS) has a rule that despite the Siri voice you choose, it needs to have at least one native voice. In other words in my case just because I’ve successfully applied the American voice it will still try to download one of the British voices as well. Whether this is male or female doesn’t seem to matter; both seem to fail.

I think you're definitely on to something. Did a little playing around today and can confirm this seems to be the case too. Do you see abnormally high Siri battery use on your iPhone? This started after I got my new series 6. I've set up as brand new twice now and nothing fixes. Have to hope this is an iOS/WatchOS bug that will fix itself I'm not sure of anything else to try (Disabling Siri still causes the bug somehow in my case)

Glad to hear it. Is your setup still UK English for watch language & region, and is it set at that or just the Mirror iPhone option? Are you on UK English for Siri language, and British female for Siri voice? Did you do anything different since your last post (unpairing or anything), or is it just last week's OS updates?

It's not fixed for me yet despite the updates, hence the reason for so many questions! I did notice the same thing as Undercover101 above in that the download cycle carries on even if you disable Siri completely, which makes me wonder if all of my messing around has just created a massive download queue of Siri voice packs that the Watch now just needs to get through.

I have been having a problem with my Watch 6 as well. The female British voice will not download. It is stuck at 1%. I have a call in with Apple, but no answer yet. I will post a solution

Siri battery usage on my 12 max with iOS 14.2.1 is 2% at 1 minute.

Apple seems to have fixed the problem in Watch OS v14.3. My 6 is working fine now.

Mine is fixed with the new Watch OS update. Try updating your watch and then reboot both iPhone and Watch and try again. Hope this helps!