Text to speech detects wrong language on iPhone

Two or three months ago I called Apple support and opened a case for this problem. Not having heard anything back after a month I called my support specialist directly and left a message to follow up. No response.

As I mentioned in a previous post this is a change in behavior. Prior versions of iOS allowed me to choose between Japanese and Chinese after selecting “speak”. iOS 11 does not.

Hello. I’m having the same problem and wanted to know if anyone has found a solution. I’ve tried switching the voices and all other suggestions given on this thread but no luck. The Spanish is read in English with an accent, very strange. I’ve been using the Voiceover for years because I’m dyslexic and need to listen to all my reading materials. This bug of theirs is extremely inconvenient. Thank you in advance for any solutions.

I agree that it is amazing how easy it is to overlook to improve basic features in the quest for the "next big thing". To get caught up by a pace enforced from outside. I would wish that Apple would find back it's obsession with quality and fix language detection issues around text to speech as well as remembering in what language I communicate with whom.

Hey I have an iPhone 7plus and I experienced the same issues as everyone here but the good news is that I was easily able to fix it.

All you need to do is go to your settings > general > accessibility > speech > voices > the non-English language of your choice and change the current voice to another voice. It should work.

In my case I was using the French default SIRI male voice and it wasn't working when swiping with the 2 fingers down to read a text, it would just read it in broken English. When I changed the French voice from default Siri male to Amelie and tried it, it worked even when I brought it back to the default Siri male which I prefer, it works perfectly.

I really love this tool, as often times I am to busy to keep my eyes on the text and need to be involved elsewhere, now I can turn any book into an audio book which is freekn fantastic and I can listen to it while cooking or waking.

Cheers

I'm having a similar problem since updating to IOS 11 today... I use my iPhones text to speech function to read my kindle books ( if they don't have audible versions) while I work and after the update, I was excited bc the voices they offered enhanced were so much more human-sounding...

BUT many of my kindle books start chapters in bold all caps timestamps and NOW my English speaking Siri female changes to a different voice and starts speak the entire page in German!?

it only happens when the page starts in bold capital words and goes back when i restart next page. this totally messes me up and I need some way to fix it. this is really messing up my daily life as sad as that is to admit, I commute many hours on the road to and from work and rely on my books to keep sane.

Q? Is there some setting not in the speech settings menu (located in another setting) that will allow me to TURN OFF the AUTO CHANGE LANGUAGE settings? at least until they get it corrected?

Here is the example of a page pic (chapter start) that throws my iphone speech-to-text into another language automatically: the top bold title is the only thing I see different from the other pages.

That did nothing to solve the situation. The only way I know is to completely change the iphones main language and then try again. It’s painful! I’m pretty sure this has broken recently as I remember using this function in the past with much success.

I’m on iOS 11 v1. iPhone 6s. If someone finds a working solution please reply. Or if the solution that was mentioned just before worked for you - did you do anything different?

It's not just bold. I am on iOS 11.0.1 on a 7 Plus and I use the screen speak function for online articles. The articles are in English and I use Samantha English to speak. Everything works fine until it comes up to an italicized word. Another voice, so far French male and German female come in to say that word in English with either a French or German accent... so it's not even translating it, just saying it with the accent. Previous iOS versions did not have this problem.

This worked for me for "read selection", but not for auto-picking the language (other than system) when pulling my two fingers from the top (speak screen).

I gather that the language pack for my secondary language must have been corrupted. But even with a functional one, the speak screen function does not work as it did on previous IOS (not even once, just 0% now).

Same problem here. Highlighting Japanese (kanji) characters and selecting “speak” -the characters get read in Chinese. Try this one... 鋸. Should be pronounced as "nokogiri" in Japanese provided that I don’t have Chinese language installed on this device.

i can see where (because Japanese kanji share characters with Chinese) that this could be an issue but considering I have the Japanese language installed it should override but I guess that feature doesn’t exist.

Yes. The only languages listed under "Preferred Language Order" are English and Japanese.

I called support last night and worked with a second tier agent for almost an hour on this. He agreed that this is a strange issue and was escalating it to engineering.

Okay so after updating to 11.0.3 my speak screen function is now totally broke (for traditional Chinese, other languages untested). When reading large chunks of text the pronunciation of certain characters get replaced with a filler (about 6/10 characters does this), rendering passages not understandable at all. The text to speech function has just been getting progressively worst and its clear no body's doing any thing about it. Is there any way to escalate the issue?

Have you found a solution yet? I needed to use speak selection to easily copy text from online articles by hand. I needed to copy codes like SFSJ47KH and stuff. It started out fine, but then it started reciting codes in other languages.

To my iPhone:

I don't know how to say numbers or letters in Hungarian, sorry, and those letters are English because I specify them as such in my language preferences, so please don't try to recite them in Japanese or Russian, etc...

If I could just delete the unused language voices, that would be great.

Nope. After selecting only Kanji characters (on a Japanese webpage) and selecting "speak" the selected text will be spoken in Chinese. Prior to iOS 11 you were given a choice. That choice has been removed.

Same issue here, I am using the "Pages" app and it's reading my Spanish text in Portuguese...

If only I could Uninstall ALL Text-to-Speech voices except for Spanish and English it would probably fix this issue... Honestly, I don't speak any other languages, and with only two choices that are extremely different it won't have much of a choice. This needs to get fixed, it's an unacceptable bug!

Well, I figured out something that seems to work for me, but only in regards to webpages, have not tested in PDFs or other Apps.

Specs: iPhoneX / iOS 11.2.5 / AT&T

Problem: In Chrome and Safari, a certain webpage that I want to use the Voiceover Command with to dictate webpage contents was reading the content in several different languages. I tried every toggle, in Settings, every menu item that had to do with languages to see if I could get it to stop.

Solution: For me, it ended up being a matter having the exact text of webpage content I wanted read out loud, aligned right up to the top of the screen edge so that it skips reading headings, website links, etc. It seems like when it has to read the whole webpage starting from the top, it's going to recognize other text you cannot see... Perhaps the webpage was designed to allow for translation in the search engines? I'm guessing on that part.

However, this is what worked for me. Best of luck to those still banging their heads. I was banging mine for a while. Hope this helps, someone!