Presumably, iOS will translate these alerts into haptics for people who have hearing loss. Our code findings uncovered a new feature that will be able to detect important sounds like fire alarms, sirens, door knocks, doorbells, and crying babies. In its exploration of the leaked iOS code, 9to5Mac has discovered what might be some major new accessibility improvements coming in iOS 14: If you think you know what that might be - or have a wish - we would love to hear in the comments to this post. Accordingly, all that we can reasonably say for now about what this finding might mean for VoiceOver users is to “watch this space”, but it does certainly appear that Apple has something in mind. The leaked code is currently in the early stages of development, so much of what's been found might not make it into the first iOS 14 beta, or even into iOS 14 at all. takes the speculation a step further by suggesting that custom synthesizers could “range from Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 computer to the Majel Barrett-Roddenberry computer voice from Star Trek”. This could potentially extend to an API for the HomePod, although this is not for certain. Voice synthesizer extensions would be bundled with apps from the App Store, and then could be offered to the system to replace the default speech voice, which could be important for languages and dialects that Apple does not support.

Information on how this might be used is speculative, with MacRumors saying: Over the past few days, 9to5Mac and MacRumors have posted details of several iOS features that are reportedly in development at Apple.īased upon findings in supposed unreleased iOS 14 code, one of these reports is of a new developer framework named VoiceProvider, which could let developers replace built-in speech voices on iOS with custom text-to-speech synthesizers.

Creating a hal 9000 voice for mac