How to Clone Your Voice on Your iPhone or Mac

One feature you may not have encountered yet on your iPhone or Mac is Personal Voice. This was only introduced in iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma. It essentially creates a clone of your voice, which you can then use in different apps.

It was built as a breakthrough accessibility feature for people at risk of losing their voice, giving them the chance to continue speaking through digital means even when they can no longer physically do so. However, it is something that anyone can take advantage of through their Apple devices.

Even if your voice works well, Personal Voice is an interesting feature to explore and set up – and an indication of the kind of technologies that artificial intelligence will continue to enable in the coming years.

On-device machine learning AI is used to do the necessary processing so that all your recorded audio stays on your devices and isn’t sent back to the cloud. (If you decide to share it between devices, it will be done in encrypted form via iCloud.) Thanks to the protections Apple has built in here, no one will be able to use the technology to impersonate you in phone calls or recordings. .

Set personal voice

From a software perspective, you’ll need iOS 17, iPadOS 17, or macOS Sonoma (or a later version) to set up Personal Voice. For hardware, you’ll need an iPhone 12, 5th generation iPad Air, 3rd generation 11-inch iPad Pro, 5th generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro or newer, or a Mac with an Apple silicon chip inside (the M1 or newer). Recording takes about 15 minutes, but you don’t have to do everything at once.

If you’re using an iPhone or iPad, go to Institutions then tap Accessibility, Personal voiceAnd Create a personal voice. On a Mac you will find the same thing Accessibility option by opening the Apple menu and then select System settings.

Follow the on-screen instructions to record your audio, name your voice, and repeat the phrases when prompted. To pause a recording session, tap or click the Finished or close the recording window, and the recordings you’ve made will be saved so you can return to them if necessary. Please note that the processing to create the voice may take several hours.

You can create more than one personal voice, and you can delete any voices you have already configured Personal voice screen Accessibility– just select the voice to reveal the option to clear it. If you want, you can also export the voice recordings you make.

Use personal voice

Go to the Accessibility And Personal voice screen on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and you’ll see two toggle switches: one to Share across devices and one to Allow applications to use your personal voice. Enable both to ensure your voice can be used on any device where you’re signed in with the same Apple ID.

Your personal voice can be used as part of another Apple accessibility feature called Live Speech, which is exactly what it sounds like: your synthesized voice spoke in real time. Select to set this Live speech of the Accessibility menu on your Apple device: You’ll see your newly created voice appear as one of the voice output options, next to the default system voice. You can also set up a bank of preset phrases from the same screen.

With Live Speech enabled, you can triple-tap the side button on an iPhone or iPad, or click the Live Speech icon in the menu bar on a Mac (it looks like a keyboard). You can then type a sentence that you then read out loud in your own voice. It will still have a synthetic advantage, but the results are impressive.

The same Live Speech shortcut can be used when you are in the Phone or FaceTime apps on your device, as well as in other apps that support the Live Speech feature. Whenever the text input box appears, you will see a bookmark icon in it. Click or tap to view your list of saved phrases.