Apple has a large catalog of text-to-speech voices available for free. In the US English catalog alone, there are 22 voices. A number of these voices come with an enhanced or premium option for the voice. As pointed out in previous blog posts, these text-to-speech voices can read to you a text message, an email, an article from the Internet, or even an entire book. Although Apple did not add any new English voices, several enhancements were added to the existing voices. These enhancements included the ability to change the pitch (timber) of the voice and the length of time a voice pauses at the end of a sentence or question.

To see all the different text-to-speech voices in iOS 17 open the Settings app and scroll down to Accessibility. Then you’ll want to click on “Spoken Content” and “Voices.” Once in this location, you can choose your preferred language and view the available voices.

This ability to change the timber and the pause of voices makes these synthetic voices sound equivalent to other high-quality artificial intelligence (AI) voices. How do you change the timber and pause of a voice? When you select a voice, you will see a circle with an “i” next to the voice. By tapping on this circle, this will open the option to change the timber and pause duration of the voice. Pitch can be changed to higher or lower, and the pause duration can be increased or decreased. After you make these changes, you can preview how the voice sounds. These adjustments to the voice will be applied anywhere you use that voice on the iPhone or iPad.

In my case, I like my voices pitched a little lower with a longer pause at the end of a sentence. As mentioned, the Apple text-to-speech voices are free and are included within the iPad and iPhone operating systems. So, for me these adjustments also save me a lot of money since the applications with the newer AI voices have a subscription fee of at least $150 a year.

I encourage you to play around with adjusting the pitch and pause of your voices. And see if these adjustments enhance your listening experience.