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

Top-ranking reply

Sigmaplus

Level 1

19 points

Posted on Apr 17, 2017 4:34 PM

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

View in context

36 replies

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.

Nov 15, 2017 10:02 AM in response to maplenight

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Text to speech detects wrong language on iPhone