Apple has filed a patent for a new technology that would allow iPhone users to listen to text messages received in the iMessage app using the sender's voice.
iPhone users can now ask Siri to read incoming text messages, as the smart assistant Siri relies on text-to-speech technology to perform this task. But the new technology promises to read texts using the sender's voice instead of Siri's voice.
To do this, the new feature requires both interlocutors to share their recordings, which contain phrases that the new service relies on to produce the desired sound.
The patent explains how the technology works: “When it is a text message from a person called ‘John’, the user may want to hear the message ‘in John’s own voice, which enhances the experience and increases the need to retrieve messages received to’ to improve the efficiency of using the device.”
According to the text of the patent, the user records an audio sample, saves it on his device, and any other user can apply to obtain the sample and, with the consent of the first user, send the sample to the phone of the second. The user, when finished, will ask the first user if they also want to hear the message in the other's voice, and if they agree, the sample part will be exchanged again in the second, so that both parties can hear the message in the owner's voice.
Through the settings, the sender can activate the automatic sending of voice samples to the SMS recipient or to a specific pre-defined destination, so that the user does not have to manually perform this step each time.
It should be noted that the text-to-speech technology using real human voices has been available for several years and relies on advanced artificial intelligence algorithms and deep learning techniques to generate artificial voices that mimic human voices.
It should be noted that patenting does not necessarily imply commercialization of the pending feature, so it is not possible to predict whether the feature will be available soon.