iPhones will soon be able to speak for you, in your voice

To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Apple has previewed a handful of new accessibility features coming to iPhone this year. The most intriguing are Live Speech and Personal Voice, two features designed to support people who are unable to speak and those at risk of losing their ability to speak.

The two features work hand-in-hand. Live Speech allows users to type what they want to say, which the iPhone will then read out loud. In addition to being used when talking to someone in person, the feature works in FaceTime and phone calls. Users can even save favourite phrases - such as a coffee order - for quick reference.

Personal Voice takes Live Speech to the next level, and allows users to train the iPhone to speak in their voice. This will require about 15 minutes of reading text prompts to train the device. This will work on iPhone 12 and later.

Another new feature accessibility feature coming soon is Assistive Access, a stripped-down user interface to support people living with cognitive disability. The standard iPhone home screen is replaced with large buttons, large text, and a persistent back button. Five apps have been tailored for this feature: Calls (which incorporates both phone calls and FaceTime), Messages, Camera, Photos, and Music.

Lastly, the Magnifier app is gaining a feature called "Point and Speak", where pointing at text in the real world will have the iPhone read it out. Apple provided the example of the app reading text labels on a microwave.

Apple hasn't confirmed a firm release date for these features, but precedent suggests they could arrive in September when the manufacturer will presumably release iOS 17. We're expecting to hear more about iOS 17 as part of Apple's developer conference at the start of June.

Alex Choros

Managing Editor + Group Telco Editor | X | Instagram | Threads | LinkedIn

Alex Choros is the Managing Editor of WhistleOut Australia and an award-winning journalist. He's been writing about consumer technology for over a decade and is an expert on the Australian telco sector, to the point where he knows far too many phone and internet plans by heart. In addition to leading the WhistleOut editorial team, Alex is responsible for ruining the office Sonos with his troubled taste in music.

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