Apple has advanced us some features that we will release with iOS 17 and one of them has caused quite an impact: Personal Voice. An accessibility option that can replicate your voice using Artificial Intelligence so that your iPhone, iPad or Mac can speak for you. What can she do? How does it work? We explain everything below.
What is Personal Voice?
Personal Voice is a new function that we will launch with iOS 17 and that will be in the Accessibility menu of our devices (iPhone, iPad and Mac). Through Artificial Intelligence you can create an artificial voice that is similar to your own, and all this with the sole use of your iPhone, iPad or Mac, without other devices and in just 15 minutes. You can not only do it with your own voice, You can also do it with the voice of other people, for example deceased relatives, although for this you must have previously trained the system with your voice. The procedure will not take more than fifteen minutes, and during it what we will have to do is follow the instructions that are indicating which sentences we must read aloud so that the system captures it.
live speech
Within Personal Voice we find another very interesting option that Apple has dubbed Live Speech, which will use your voice already created through Personal Voice to read texts that you have previously written during a phone call or FaceTime. That is to say, You can make phone calls or video calls even if you can’t speak, because you can write the text you want to say and your interlocutor will hear it as if it were your own voice., imitating your accent and tonality. You can even leave already written phrases, such as greetings or goodbyes, to “say” them simply by touching the screen, without having to write them again.
Requirements
In order to use Personal Voice you must meet the following minimum requirements:
- A iPhone or iPad running iOS/iPadOS 17 or higher
- A Mac with Apple Silicon processor and macOS 14 or higher
At the moment Personal Voice will be only available in englishs but it will be extended to other languages shortly.
Who is Personal Voice for?
It is a function within the Accessibility menu of your device, it is not something that is intended for all users, although anyone who wants to can use it. According to Apple, this new functionality is aimed at the millions of people around the world who cannot use their voice or who will lose their voice over time. For example, patients with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) or any other patient who has progressively lost their voice. We remind you that the user must first have recorded their voice for the system to work.so it will not work for those who have already lost their voice, but for those who may lose it over time and can anticipate it.
Privacy
One of the questions that surely many of you have in your head is what privacy guarantees Apple offers us with this function. As always, Apple ensures that the entire procedure is carried out on our device, nothing is done at the server level and nobody can listen to your recordings. Everything you do stays on your device and does not leave there, although if you wish you can explicitly allow synchronization through iCloud so that all your devices can use Personal Voice without having to configure it on each of them.
How is it configured?
You will have to read aloud phrases chosen at random that appear on the screen of your device. The procedure requires about 15 minutes of training for the voice that is created to be close enough to your own, but you won’t have to do it in one try. If for any reason during training you have to leave it, you can pick it up later right where you left off. Once this procedure is finished, not everything is done, now all the data must be analyzed within the device itself, for which it may be necessary to leave it on charge for a whole night.
As we said before, you will not have to perform this procedure on all your devices, but to do so You must activate synchronization through iCloud expressly. If you do not want this to be the case, then you must carry out the training in each and every one of them.