an observation about VoiceOver voices

Your observation is totally correct. Yeah Sandy is the one in VoiceOver that sounds like Bobby and Jaws. And yeah, you do have to do something to adjust the breathing on that cause it sounds horrible otherwise. And then the flow voice does sound like Sandy and Jaws. They renamed some of them. The other one is that the Eddie Voice and Voice is actually Glenn and Jaws. I have no idea why they did this but it’s one of those things that I’m guessing maybe they had to do that in order to license eloquence to that Apple products. I’m not 100% sure I’m just guessing.

Same here. I use eloquence, and have stucked with Red as my default. you can make it sound more human by raising the pitch range to 100. If you leave it at its default, it will sound like a monotone robot. Yes, Sandy you have to adjust the breathiness and as with Eddie it is the Glenn voice in jaws.

I always found a pitch range option a little bit weird. I’m so used to the main inflection. The eloquence always had so when you change it to a higher level of inflection, it just makes eloquent sound very often somehow. I don’t really know how to describe it, but I just sounds definitely not. I’m used to. I ended up stopping using eloquence on my devices because they were so much quieter than the regular voices that are normally an iPhone such as a vocalizer voice. So for now I’m using Samantha enhanced on my iPhone SE 2022 and I’m using Karen premium on my iPhone 15. I may go back to eloquence if they can do anything about the quality of the voices, but even on my computer with Jaws, I don’t use anymore. I use the vocalizer voices. But if that works for people to switch the picture and I may try that and see if I like it. Yeah you definitely have to adjust the breath to zero to get it to sound like how Bobby sounds and jaws for Sandy. And the weird thing is now there’s some kind of bug where those studies stay if you get out of synthesize or you go back to it. It will go back towards default, even if you’ve saved those settings.

OK, I’ll have to try again. I have an iPhone 15 and an iPhone SE 2022 and they’re both running iOS 26.5. My favorite eloquence voice is Bobby if it’s Jaws Sandy if it’s and then Glenn if it’s Jaws and if it’s and then flows voiceover and Sandy jaws. Yeah those are the eloquence I like. I will have to try that. Thanks for the heads up.

I’m using eloquent Eddie British variant right now and you’re right. The volume is definitely improved for sure. This is on my iPhone SE 2022. It kind of sounds nice. I think I’ll leave it on this for a while. See how I like it.

Interesting discussion here: I've always used the Reed voice. I do agree though that the Eloquence voices are way quieter than the vocalizer ones. i do wish they could do something to make the higher sample rate sound better. To be fair though, I don't know if that's even an option in JAWS.

A couple years ago I connected my AirPods Pro to my computer at work using JAWS and Eloquence sounded exactly the same as on my phone. It was kinda trippy realizing that my work computer and my only personal device, the phone in my hand, sounded exactly alike.

I used to have quite elaborate sound schemes set up in JAWS back when I used it all the time, and I used to get flack for it. All in good fun of course. I would love to have that on my iPhone if Apple would let you tweak settings that much.

I went back to the vocalizer voices. The volume of eloquence is definitely a bit better than it used to be, but I just can’t get used to those voices coming out of my phone. They’ve always come out of computers since I have like 10 years old when I first started using jaws so now it’s really weird hearing it coming out of the phone. I’m just not used to that so I’m sticking with premium Karen and both of my devices for voiceover and British one for Siri.

As far as I can remember when iOS 16 introduced Eloquence, they sounded completely different than now and also when selecting flo it was much faster than the other variants. Also in the early betas we once had again a different version that sounded completely downsampled and even rouined the phone speaker of a friend.

I, like many others, have noticed that Eloquence does sound quieter than the Vocalizer voices, and I find myself switching back and forth between them. I really appreciate the way Eloquence clearly separates commas, full stops, and other punctuation marks, making it much easier to follow the text. The Vocalizer TTS, however, does not do this as effectively, and it sometimes adds strange inflections in odd places, which can be distracting. I am very glad that someone else has brought this issue to attention, as I was beginning to think I was imagining things! It is reassuring to know that others have experienced the same challenges, and I hope this feedback helps improve the experience for everyone.

I have noticed a very strange thing when it comes to eloquence: when we are at the Speech volume option, it is 100, or as the option says “1”. But if I increase it, it will be a comparable volume of eloquence as other text to Speech, meaning it does not stay quieter, or comparable to what it was when we first chose eloquence as a text to Speech. It is a very, very strange and peculiar thing, and I don’t know how it happens! But oh well, I was able to increase the volume of eloquence, louder but not quite as vocaliser, but it can get the job done and we are able to use our phones as we used to.

I am never, and I mean, never ever using eloquence on my phone. That's just a computer voice, period.

Why the hostility? I mean, some folks were trained using eloquence, and in fact is all they are comfortable with. It's fine if you don't want to use it, but don't bash others because they prefer to use it. 😇

I completely agree with Brian. Even if it’s just synthesize that I don’t prefer myself there’s no reason to bash anybody else’s preferences. As I said, I don’t love it coming out of my phone either, but I at least was willing to give it a try. Right now on my iPhone SE I’m using regular Karen for voiceover, but I’m using Karen premium on my iPhone 15. The only thing I really wish that I could do is delete some of the eloquent voices because the only eloquence voices I really like is Sandy, flow, and Eddie. Jaws they are Bobby, Glenn, and Sandy. That’s the only ones I ever liked in Jaws too. And the best vocalizer voices for me is Karen and Samantha in any marriage. I really hope that we can get a premium Samantha for the iPhones at some point as we have premium for some of the vocalizer voices already. We’ll just have to see what happens if I was 27.

When Eloquence was the only option in JAWS, I used it; had settings that were at least vaguely tolerable, but as soon as the vocalizer voices became responsive enough for daily use, I ditched Eloquence and never looked back. To me, the volume on Eloquence voices is significantly lower, and they sound very muffled to me compared to Vocalizer voices. I know Eloquence is super popular with a lot of users, but as someone who can't go past speaking rate of 60 on apple toys/40 in jaws speech rates, the fact that Eloquence can go super fast holds no appeal for me. Interesting to know that Eddy is the Glen voice; that's the only Eloquence voice I was able to use back in the day.

I totally get not loving eloquence. I switched my jaws voice to vocalizer as soon as I could as well. Same thing from my phone. My SE phone is using Samantha and my iPhone 15 is using Karen and right now they’re just on the regular reinstalled versions, but I like all in both voices and Jaws. I’m using Karen premium high. I wish we had premium high voices available for the phones, but we don’t yet. This is still better than no Karen and Samantha though.

I think I have mentioned this elsewhere, but both my Windows laptop, and my iPhone SE 2022 are using the Samantha voice. Compact on my iPhone, premium High (or whatever it's called) on my Windows laptop.
My Alexa device on the other hand, uses the equivalent of Karen Enhanced. 😇

It’s called premium high in jaws. :-) I’m using regular Samantha on my iPhone SE 2022 also. I think the regular voices are just better on smaller speakers like the iPhones. It’s why I switched my care invoice on my iPhone 15 to the regular one too. Yeah I really wish that we could get premium high voices for phones, but I don’t think they just have the right speakers and pressing power yet. I love that you use like a Karen like Voice on your Alexa though that’s so cool.

I enjoy having the same voice experience on all of my devices as much as possible. So, I've got Vocalizer Nathan on my computer with JAWS, my iphone, my Apple Watch and all three of my Apple TV boxes. I don't know why, but something about Samantha's voice has always irritated me; same goes for Ava to a lesser extent. Karen's voice is the most pleasant to listen to, but Nathan seems to be the voice which is easiest for me to hear and understand. I'd be thrilled if there were more/better options available, but JAWS hasn't given us new voices in quite a few years now, and I don't think we'll get any fun new voices from Apple any time soon either.

I think the last time we got any new voices in jaws must draw 2022 or 2023. And those were Noel, Stephanie, and Evan. I don’t know if there’s new ones for John 2026 because I haven’t installed that yet. My subscription is supposed to be renewing on June 19 for that. I don’t think we’ll be getting any new voices from Apple that are different other than maybe it’s more vocalizer ones or something, but I think that has to do with the fact that phones don’t have the processing power to be able to use more human sounding voices for screen readers. I’m just guessing because being able to do normal navigation of devices and stuff a certain amount of processing power and I don’t think we’re there yet for the more human sounding kind of voice. Yeah, there’s a few people that don’t really like Samantha but it’s totally cool. That’s why we have all those options. Thank you are my girls. I’ve always liked them ever since I got my first iPhone. My first iPhone was an iPhone 8 and it was running iOS 13.3 something. That was actually my first introduction to the vocalizer voices. I did have some in Jaws when they were scanned soft voices, but I kind of forgotten about that. It was stuck with Alec ones until I realize that we can get Jaws and I’ve downloaded all of those now with the jobs manager. I know you mean about having the same voice and all your devices. I actually just switched to my iPhone SE to Karen to now. Both of my Bruins are using Karen and also of my computers are using Karen. I’ll probably stick with that. I think sorry for long post.

I check the FS page periodically for new voices, but the newest ones I've found came out with JAWS 18, so yeah, it's been a while. I'd like to use Evan, but he doesn't exist for jaws, except in a sapi 5 version, and those are a bit too sluggish for daily use.

Evan is available in jaws in the vocalizer expressive voices. He became available in Jaws 2022 or 2023. Hope you can find him. He’s Evan high in the United States category.

Well, I don't know about the compact voices, but the link below is for Freedom Scientific's synthesizer download page, for the United States English voices. There does not seem to be a download link for Evan, however.
You can download the compact voices from this link as well.

https://support.freedomscientific.com/Downloads/Synthesizers

I was able to download Evan through the voices manager, our Jaws not the website. You can go on the website to download Voice if you want to. I just thought it was easier and faster to just go through the options and then voices and then the ad remover Elijah your Voice is the job manager fair now so you don’t have to go through freedom scientific website, and oven was available through there. Hope we can find it for the computer. The other way that you can download vocalizer voices is by going to the voices and then underneath that you drain the Voice adjustment there’ll be a spot that will say add/remove vocalizer voices and you can get Evan that way. That’s actually how I downloaded all of vocalizer voices because it’s just faster and easier to do that for me going through the website. I was able to get Evan that way. Hope you can find him for your computer.