Cannot change the announce voice in time and dates

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Level 1

8 points

Cannot change the announce voice in time and dates

Already tried to remove and add new voices either through time and dates or in speech, every voice except for the Siri female and Siri male works, which are the two voices that I want. Always says: Voices aren't available to download at this time, try again later.

Every time I deleted all the downloaded voices, the system voice in the time and dates switch to the one I believe is Daniel, which has already been deleted. But the voice in Speech is still Siri female, and cannot be deleted along with the Siri male by untick the box. Is there a way for me to reset all the voices and re-download them? How do I make the time announce voice to be Siri female?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 6, 2020 3:21 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Marc Marshall

Level 1

142 points

Nov 6, 2020 9:18 PM in response to T_Xu

This is interesting. Your question made me go in and look at it myself, and I seem to be seeing a variant of what you've got going on:

If I go to Speech under Accessibility, I can select and successfully download or otherwise turn voices on and off. There are two "American Siri Female in the list, one of which results in Victoria, but otherwise it works fine.

But... if I go to the clock, the sample announcement when I click "play" is not the selected system default--I get I think Alex regardless of who is selected as the system default. But when actually announcing the time, I do get the correct system default voice.

Stranger, when in the Time & Date pref pane, it doesn't show the installed voices and if I try to change what voices are installed i get the same error you do: "Voices aren't available to download at this time. Try again later."

Additionally, right clicking and selecting Speech, I again get Alex instead of the selected system default voice.

It sounds like in your case you're getting the "unable to download" error both in Time & Date and Accessibility -> Speech, correct? The user I'm logged in as has been migrated through about 2 decades of MacOS, so I tried digging in and deleting any prefs that had "Voice" or "Speech" in them, but that didn't do any good. Must be some sort of leftover settings junk, though...

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Answer 2

T_Xu Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 7, 2020 7:06 AM in response to Marc Marshall

Thank you! Yes I've tested it and got the same results.

As long as the voice in speech is correct, set the time announcing voice to system default will also make it the same as the speech one. But when clicking the play button next to the customise, it's still a wrong voice. I suppose both the download problem and the voice switching issue are system bugs. So now I just set the voice I want in the Speech menu and set the voice announcement to system default, and it did solve the problem despite the wrong sample.

Hope Apple fix that in Big Sur.

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Cannot change the announce voice in time and dates

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