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maplenight Author

Level 1

34 points

Text to speech detects wrong language on iPhone

I use text-to-speech (speak screen) on my iPhone (iOS 10, system language set to English) to read out articles I need to read. But it has problem of detecting correctly the languages of the articles. Very often it reads Spanish text in English prononciation, or Chinese text in Japanese. I can't find a way to manually select the language when launching speak screen. What's worse, some of the corrected read Spanish text in iOS 9 get wrong in iOS 10.

I did try to set the system language to Spanish, then some of the Spanish text which were wrongly detected can be read correctly. So it shows this error of language detection has nothing to do with the text itself, but iOS' detection method.

Anyone can help? Thank you!

OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Oct 1, 2016 8:29 PM

Best reply

dovetailer

Level 1

8 points

Posted on Jan 8, 2018 1:14 PM

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.

View in context

36 replies

Feb 16, 2018 3:19 PM in response to maplenight

I don't have an exact solution but for anyone using the Kindle app and having this problem, I found a workaround. I simply change the size of the text and then reswipe down to restart the speaking. It usually works, though sometimes you have to play with the text size. (Not sure of the logic behind this but it works.) Again, this isn't a general fix, though. I also notice that pdfs in iBooks no longer work properly. The first page is read then just page numbers or nothing after that. REALLY disappointing as my productivity has now crashed. (A lot like my feelings for Apple.) I wish Apple was like it used to be, when everything "just worked." Now everything just "used to" work.

Feb 18, 2018 7:28 AM in response to maplenight

My Apple 8 is a defective phone. Absolutely not a US phone. With Voice typing it makes up words from other countries,primarily Asian. It doesn’t know to put a period in at the end of a sentence and writes the word out. I have had iPhone and apple products since they came in the market and I won’t buy Apple in the future. The language barrier has seriously put a damper on my professional business, as I must multi-task non stop 20 hours a day 7 days all week. Just don’t have time for this nonsense! So sorry to have lost Steve Jobs! When you llose a creator, the life is lost. Enough said!

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,036 points

Oct 1, 2016 9:22 PM in response to maplenight

I think there may not be any "detection," you have to choose the voice/language you want manually.

Adjust voices for VoiceOver, Speak Screen, and Speak Selection on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support

maplenight Author

Level 1

34 points

Oct 4, 2016 11:24 PM in response to maplenight

Well. I'm not sure if I made myself clear, or if you understood me correctly. There is NO way to choose manually! If you know how to do this, please clarify.

Oct 18, 2016 5:14 PM in response to maplenight

I have the exact same problem, the iOS is set in english but I want to text-to-speach Italian articles.In iOS 8 and 9 this was working 99% of the time, now with iOS 10 I'd say the correct language detection is around 30%.

The only workaround I know is to select a smaller portion of text, so that it is easier for the AI to detected the correct lang.

Nov 8, 2016 3:32 PM in response to maplenight

Hi,

I have that same problem on my iPhone 6s Plus and iPad. For me the switch between German and English does not work. And sometimes Japanese is not read out when an English paragraph came before it. My phone language is German. I read Japanese and English as well.

I tried many different voices and reinstalling my OS. Nothing worked. Only selecting a smaller text chunk works most of the time, but often German reads Engish text still then.

All this did worked in iOS9 and I was supprised it changed. I guess it is some kind of bug. I will try it with my friends phones.

I am very disappointed by the bad quality management in place here as many more accessible features have huge bugs as well.

Ivy231

Level 1

4 points

Nov 17, 2016 12:04 AM in response to maplenight

I have this problem as well, only the issue is with Chinese text being read in Greek or Korean (only the punctuation is read, everything else is skipped with speak screen, leading to whole articles being skipped over). It was pretty ridiculous considering these languages have next to nothing in common and the articles this happened in was just pure Chinese text. I read in English, Chinese, Japanese and French and only have these four languages added to my phone's language and input so i guess the preferred language order selection under keyboard doesn't seem to affect speak screen at all. It's really fustrating as even a hard reset does nothing in fixing the issue.

Nov 17, 2016 11:07 AM in response to maplenight

I have found that the "Speak Screen" method reads in the iphone's native language (ie screen language), while the "speak selection" correctly identifies the language and switches. This behaviour is the same in "reading mode" for Safari as for the regular page view. That is, Speak screen doesn't detect but speak selection does. I've verified that the web pages I tested have the header tag: <HTML xml: lang="fr" ...> that should indicate the language to use.

In Notes, the "speak sentence" detects the language but "speak screen" still reads in the display language. Also, "select all" reads in the display language while the same selection made with "select" reads it in the detected language.

Strange behaviour indeed.

Yausma

Level 1

4 points

Dec 9, 2016 4:18 AM in response to EduTechRM

Hi, yes, this is also what I observed. With my previous iPhone5s speak screen could detect the language. But since I have the new iPhone7Plus this behavior is changed.

Not sure whether this is intended. I don't think so. I also noticed that in the past you had to enable the voices per language, but seems (in new iOS?) that all voices are selected by default. There is no way to disable these..

Apr 29, 2017 3:56 PM in response to Sigmaplus

It does not Work for me. It's a bug I posted since September. Apple admitted that bug but still not corrected.

rart

Level 1

4 points

May 23, 2017 12:25 PM in response to Tekyman007

Where do you find out about what apple voices about bugs and such?

I'm also having this issue. On iBooks, using the speak screen, it's reading a PDF that's in spanish in portuges.

Jun 2, 2017 1:19 PM in response to maplenight

I use whatsapp to have iphone read text in other languages to me.

1. created group on whatsapp called reader

2. Copy and paste text

3. Click send

4. Select received msg on whatsapp- click Speak.

Oct 4, 2017 11:24 AM in response to MorganMcP30

Update: Everything doesn't work fine, even non-italicized words are affected. It does seem to get perpetually worse the longer the speaking goes on...

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,036 points

Oct 21, 2017 2:37 PM in response to dovetailer

Do you have japanese higher than chinese on the Preferred Languages setting?

Oct 24, 2017 1:04 PM in response to maplenight

I’m having the same **** problem and it’s frustrating the crap out of me haha. Did you ever find a fix?

Text to speech detects wrong language on iPhone