Apple Shares Heartwarming Ad Highlighting ‘Personal Voice’ iPhone Feature

Apple shared a heartwarming ad this week promoting its new Personal Voice accessibility feature, which was introduced in iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma 14 for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

What Is Personal Voice?

Personal Voice allows users to create a synthesized voice that will sound very similar to their actual voice. This allows users who are faced with losing their voice to continue communicating with others in a more natural way.

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Personal Voice is used with another accessibility feature, Live Speech, which allows users to type what they want to say and have it spoken aloud by the device. The feature can be used during in-person conversations, on phone calls, FaceTime calls, and more.

The video, entitled The Lost Voice shows how physician and disability advocate Tristram Ingham uses both features to read a bedtime story to a young girl. Apple has shared details about Ingham’s life in an Apple Stories article found here.

A bit of caution, if you tear up easily, you may want to have a tissue handy while watching the video.

Ingham is a New Zealand resident who has facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD). The disease causes progressive muscle degeneration, starting in the face, shoulders, and arms. FSHD can eventually steal the ability of a person to speak for oneself, feed oneself, or in extreme cases, blink their eyes.

“I find that by the end of a long day, just bringing up my voice gets a bit harder,” he says, recounting a recent, frustrating incident: “I had to give a conference presentation just last month, and it turned out that, on the day, I wasn’t able to deliver it because of my breathing. So I had to get someone else to present for me, even though I had written it.”

In the future, it is possible Ingham may not be able to use his speaking voice at all. “I’m very aware on a professional level that using my voice is getting harder. I am aware that when I get more fatigued, I get quieter, harder to understand,” he says, noting the cognitive dissonance of a progressive condition. “But on a human level, I put that out of my mind, because what can one do about it?”

Setting Up and Using Personal Voice

It does take a bit of time to set up Personal Voice, so be sure to set aside enough time to perform the needed steps, starting with a 15-minute recording session where you’ll be asked to say and repeat a set of phrases.

Since your Personal Voice is generated directly on your iPhone, and only while the device is locked and charging, the time it takes to complete the needed processing can take from one to three days to finish. Your iPhone will notify you when the process has been completed.

You’ll need to have at least iOS 17 installed on your iPhone.

Here’s how to set up Personal Voice:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Scroll down and choose Accessibility.
3. Scroll down one more time and select Personal Voice.
4. Choose Create a Personal Voice.
5. Use Face ID or Touch ID to unlock the feature.
6. Select Continue to move through the introduction screens.
7. Give your personal voice a name and select Continue.
8. Check your sound quality and start saying the phrases you’ll see on screen.
9. You’ll be guided through repeating a total of 150 phrases in your natural voice.

Once you’ve done that initial training, your iPhone will work on generating your Personal Voice over the course of the next several hours or days whenever your iPhone is locked and charging. How long it takes will depend on how often you charge your iPhone and the A-series chip inside.