Personal Voice not syncing as I'd expect and other UX issues.
Background - I'm having a glossectomy (tongue removal) in a week's time and I'm evaluating Apple's Personal Voice to decide whether to buy personal Apple devices as my main phone etc.
Note, I have 2FA enabled on my account - I know that's a requirement of PV syncing.
I drive an MBP work device but unfortunately iCloud is locked out so can't test it there. So I borrowed an iPad Pro and signed the user out and myself in. I then recorded 3 PVs and enabled syncing across devices. I also exported the zip files and uploaded these to iCloud Drive. I left it a few days and I then signed out of iPad and of course they are on the device so they persisted. I deleted them from the device and then I signed in again. They returned but only in name. The preview button no longer speaks the voice, nor does using it for real via the a11y settings. I've since repeated the experiment but always on charge and leaving at 100%. Second time around, the 3 voices did not even come back. Weirdly the original ones did and are still broken.
As a user that wants to "bank" their voice before it's completely gone, this doesn't give me confidence in Apple at all. Ideally you would be able to import the zip file that you can export. At least I could be in control of the backups then. It would also be good to see a list of non-private metadata around the voices on iCloud i.e. their names and dates. And perhaps being able to lock them from any accidental deletion (do deletes on device perform a syncing delete on iCloud?). Also, I know Apple's AI allowed the training data to reduce from 150 to just 10 phrases, but for users in my situation, it would be great to give an option of as many training phrases as you like to make the voice as perfect of a clone as is possible. Finally, it would be fantastic to have other base languages, like English UK or English Ireland, or better yet, English Dublin. My PVs lack of training data means it leans into US intonation so comes off like listening to a SatNav system with just a hint of me.
Personal Voice is sensitive, private data BUT it would give me solace to know which Personal Voices exist in iCloud and whether they are "healthy".
In the meantime, if anyone knows a solution to the syncing problem, please reply.
