Downloadable voices or higher quality variants do not show up in Safari

[HadrienGardeur]

On macOS, iOS and iPadOS, Apple provides a pretty nice range of voices across various languages and regions.

Most of them require to go in system settings to download them, or a higher quality variant.

While this work well on desktop when running Chrome/Edge/Firefox, none of them show up when listing voices in Safari. This makes things even worse on iOS and iPadOS where Safari is the only option available, and all other browsers are built on top of it.

Links:

• TBD

Related links:

• https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/723503

[HadrienGardeur]

This bug is even worse than I expected when testing on recent builds of macOS/iOS:

• installing multiple variants of a voice results in these voices disappearing from Safari completely when calling getVoices()
• this can result in a language disappearing completely from Safari if all default voices have higher quality variants installed
• in addition, with the updated component for managing voices on macOS in macOS 15 Sequoia (which seems to be shared with iOS now), it's no longer possible to uninstall voice packs

This results in a fairly catastrophic situation where voices or even languages can disappear completely from Safari on macOS, without any way of going back.
I'll need to do some additional testing, but I'm worried that this will also be the case on iOS/iPadOS.

I think we're reaching a point where this issue needs to be escalated through various organizations. cc @GeorgeKerscher @avneeshsingh @gautierchomel @gregoriopellegrino

[jashson]

With the latest macOS Sequoia, iPadOS 18 and iOS18, the only high quality voice for german "Anna" has gone. Now there are only the Eloquence voices left which are totally unusable.

At least for many other languages like english, french, italian, ... there a still good quality voices available in Safari.

[HadrienGardeur]

@jashson I'm still seeing Anna on my device, because I haven't installed the higher quality variants ("Enhanced" and "Premium" in English) of that voice.

This is the same bug that I pointed out in my previous message, which made me raise this issue's severity from major to critical.