Personal Voice Generator 4+

Works. Much better than Live Speech for long form content.

Personal Voice is the new accessibility feature released in iOS 17 that allows you to generate a digital clone of your own voice. As of iOS 17, the only built-in way to use a Personal Voice is by pulling up the Live Speech panel and typing in (or pasting in) what you’d like it to say.

Live Speech works okay for short phrases but after a few paragraphs it doesn’t work so well — it glitches, and there is a character limit to how much you can input into the Live Speech panel.

This app is basically a better, less buggy version of Live Speech. The app runs as a standalone app instead of a floating panel. To test it, I pasted a relatively long news article into this app and it read the entire thing without glitching. The only issue was that after awhile I noticed that the word highlighting had gone out of sync with the reading. At the end of the article, it was a few words behind where the audio was. This may be an iOS issue though, as I’ve noticed it happening with native text to speech throughout iOS, on web pages and in apps using the system Speak Text function.

The app does allow you to record its audio output. It does this by turning on screen capturing for you (it asks for permission using the system dialog). So to record, you must sit through the entire reading. Once the recording is finished (or if you stop it early) the app automatically discards the video part of the recording and presents you with a Share dialog to save the audio.

If you are looking to use Personal Voice to record a long speech in your own voice, you could accomplish this much more quickly with this app than you could with the Live Speech panel.

Would like to see more features and better syncing with word highlighting (if possible) but otherwise I’m very happy with this app and I think it’s a useful tool that should help many people. Hopefully some day Apple will open up Personal Voice to allow its use system-wide for all text-to-speech tasks, but until then this app can fill in some of the gaps.