How Can I Change the Voices Used in the App?

There are a variety of voices you can use within the system to customize your student’s listening experience.

‍Available Voices‍

If you have premium voices turned on, the system will default to using the premium voices. As these voices are more human-sounding, we find most students prefer this setting.

If the premium voices are unavailable or turned off, the app uses voices that are pre-installed on the device that your student is using. Voices vary quite a bit between devices and the operating system on the device. For example, OS X 10.9 had a wide variety of voices - some of which were quite annoying. Starting with OS X 10.11 and beyond, Apple standardized the pre-loaded voices which created a sound experience that was much better.

When it comes to voices in the app, students usually have specific and personal preferences. For that reason, we added the ability to turn off undesirable voices and instead default to the voices your student prefers.‍

Turning Off Undesirable Voices

On the device that your student is currently using, navigate to the Dashboard and click the settings button above and to the right of their avatar.

In the resulting window, select the Voices tab. Use the Pronunciation field at the top of the screen and enter your student’s name phonetically. You can modify the spelling of your student’s name to sound out the name as you wish it to sound. You can then press the play button to the left of that field to hear a preview of how your student’s name will be pronounced within the app.

You can then turn individual voices from the list of available options on and off. As you do this, the system will announce the voice so that you can hear how it sounds and decide if you want that voice to be an option when your student is using the app. Please remember to select Save when you’re finished testing the voices so that your preferences are locked down going forward.