Siri voice in Germany gets a quality boost thanks to machine learning

Siri in Germany has finally received upgraded voices almost three years after the English voices were significantly improved when iOS 11 launched back in 2017.

German site iphone-ticker.de reported Wednesday that some German-language users have noticed that Siri’s localized voices have improved considerably on their Apple devices. To them, the Siri voice now sounds more melodic and natural, especially on HomePod.

Other people, however, are complaining that the personal assistant “sounds like helium” after the update, but AppleInsider has a pretty good idea why that appears to be happening:

There are cases where Siri’s voice will revert from the now human-sounding normal to a more robotic one, and this may be what’s happening for these users. It happens when your iOS device is particularly low on space and the device offloads the richer Siri voice.

Before today, more natural sounding Siri voices were limited to English-language users.

Apple first announced at the WWDC back in 2017 that its digital personal assistant would sound significantly more human in the future, but it appears its engineers needed more than three years to make true on that promise for Apple’s German-language fans.

Siri is getting a more natural voice in iOS 13

“We’re making a big upgrade to your primary interface in dealing with Siri, and that’s Siri’s voice,” Apple’s software engineering chief Craig Federighi said during the WWDC 2017 keynote. “We’ve used deep learning now to create a really natural and expressive voice for Siri.”

You can watch that segment embedded below (the fun part starts at 55:40)

Previously, they used snippets of pre-recorded human voices to construct sentences.

Siri received another important boost in terms of text-to-speech quality with the announcement at last year’s WWDC that Apple was shifting the voice assistant to neural text-to-speech technology which means that the iOS 13 voice of Siri is entirely generated by software.

That’s why Siri’s pronunciation now sounds more natural than back when Apple was using audio clips from voice actors, particularly when speaking longer phrases such as when reading the news or answering knowledge questions.

Modern-day Siri is also better at stressing syllables accurately than the older version, and that’s especially true when she pronounces complicated words and constructs longer sentences.

Are you using Siri on a regular basis these days?

Let us know in the comments down below!