Given that Catalina is about to be replaced this is not really credible – the bug is nearly a year old now – at least. Apparently it is a bug known to Apple and she said that she sees a big focus on accessibility updates and expects it to be solved rather sooner than later. Was not able to solve this issue and the agent has the same issue on the Mac she worked on. Talked to Apple on the phone today for over an hour and shared my screen. If anything, it would be nice if I could at least set the fallback voice instead of it automatically choosing one of the voices I don't like. The reason I assume this is happening is that depending on the length of the selected text, it can take a long time to start actually reading if it's a lot of text. I'm assuming that the main problem is that when using the Siri voice, it still sends the text somewhere on the internet and then it comes back. The main reason why I want this to work is that I have some apps that just automatically read the audio for you that the keybind won't work in, so I don't have that option.

I even tried deleting all voices except Siri and still get the terrible quality female voice. Now I get some super-low quality female voice that isn't even one of the options that I still have available. So I deleted the male voices so that they weren't options anymore. If I select any of the non-Siri voices, it works fine. But if I right click and go to the speech sub-menu and choose 'Star Speaking' I just get the Alex voice.

If I make a keybind to have Siri speak either the entire document or selection, it then works. I've also noticed this same problem and it's really annoying.

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