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If I get through a meeting without saying a word, I consider it a great success.
Unfortunately, there are times when I can no longer stay under the radar. The microphone must be unmuted, the camera might have to go on, and all the attention is on me.
At least, that was the case until this week.
Thanks to a new iPhone feature that lets anyone clone their voice with no technical chops and little time required, meeting anxiety temporarily became a thing of the past.
Announced back in May and now available as part of the public beta for iOS 17, the next major software update for Apple‘s smartphone due out in September, the “personal voice” tool lets my voice read aloud any text whatsoever without needing to speak for myself.
How does it work?
The feature lives in the accessibility section of the iPhone’s settings app, under the speech heading.
To make your own on-demand digital voice, your handset tasks you with reading aloud 150 pretty random phrases, which takes about 15 or 20 minutes depending on your patience.
“A German-born author won the prize for writing”, “during the Middle Ages in Europe, people bathed less often”, and “Ancient Greeks laid the foundation of Western culture” were some of the sentences I was given. I got some weird questions afterwards from people who could hear me in the next room.
The phone needs plenty of time to process the voice as it’s all done on the device itself, rather than uploaded to powerful computers somewhere at Apple HQ.
It needs to be locked and kept on charge, so probably best you leave it to work overnight.
With the voice ready for action, you enable the “live speech” function in settings and pick your personal voice. Triple tapping the phone’s side button will open a text box, and anything you enter will be spoken aloud.
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