The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2023
Apple Personal Voice: iOS 17 lets people bank their own voice before speech loss
Read about 150 phrases aloud and iOS 17 builds a private, on-device clone of your voice, so typed words are spoken in your voice.
Apple Inc.
What it had to solve
People with ALS, muscular dystrophy and similar conditions can progressively lose their ability to speak, leaving only generic-sounding text-to-speech voices. Apple, which builds accessibility features with disability communities, set out to let a person keep their actual voice for the day they can no longer speak.
How it works
Every year people diagnosed with ALS or conditions such as FSHD face losing their ability to speak. Standard text-to-speech tools can speak for them, but in a stranger's voice; Apple's accessibility team wanted the voice itself preserved. Announced in May 2023, Personal Voice lets someone record their own voice while they still have it, so the device can speak for them later.
The setup is deliberately simple: read a randomized set of text prompts aloud on an iPhone or iPad — Apple says about 15 minutes of audio, while early tests reported 150 phrases taking 20–30 minutes. On-device machine learning builds and stores a synthesized voice locally, keeping the data private, and Personal Voice connects to Live Speech so users can type what they want to say and have it spoken in their own voice during calls, FaceTime and face-to-face conversation.
Apple framed the feature around people at risk of speech loss rather than curious consumers. In November 2023 it released 'The Lost Voice', a short film directed by Taika Waititi and starring Dr. Tristram Ingham, a physician and disability advocate from New Zealand who has FSHD — a condition that can ultimately lead to speech loss — and who uses Personal Voice in real life; the film landed ahead of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities on December 3.
Why it lands
- It treats a person's voice as an asset you can bank before you lose it, rather than a loss to compensate for afterwards.
- Recording happens while speech is still healthy and follows a guided script, so the model is ready when it is needed — not reconstructed from scarce old recordings.
- On-device machine learning keeps the voice private, removing the trust barrier a cloud-based clone would raise for the very people who need it most.
- Tying the clone to Live Speech gives it a daily job — typed words spoken aloud on calls and FaceTime — instead of a hypothetical future use.
What it did
Personal Voice turned 'voice banking' from a niche assisted-communication service into a free operating-system feature, with the voice model kept private on the device. In November 2023 Apple released 'The Lost Voice', a Taika Waititi-directed short starring Dr. Tristram Ingham, a New Zealand physician with FSHD who uses Personal Voice in real life, timed to the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
What you can take
Don't retrofit a generic voice onto a personal loss: make the person's own voice the deliverable, keep the model on-device for trust, and ship it before it is needed.
Since then
Personal Voice shipped in the public iOS 17 release in September 2023, initially in English, with Apple supporting creation on iPhone, iPad and Mac with Apple silicon. 'The Lost Voice' premiered in late November 2023 and drew coverage of speech accessibility ahead of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities; CNET's reporter, who had tested the feature, called the resemblance uncanny and impressive. Apple presented Personal Voice as one of several features designed with disabled communities, alongside Live Speech, Assistive Access and Point and Speak.
Sources
- iOS 17 Lets You Create a Voice That Sounds Like You
- iOS 17 Lets You Clone Your Voice on Your iPhone
- Taika Waititi's New Apple Film Shows Off the iPhone's Speech Accessibility Tools
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