Create Your Own Personal Voice

Did you know your iPhone has a built-in feature that will create a clone of your voice in less than two minutes, which you can then use for loads of other things on your phone? Here’s how it works.

In the Settings app, I’m going to go to Accessibility, and then scroll down to where it says Personal Voice. From here, we’re going to tap on the option to create a Personal Voice. This process has changed since last year — it’s now way quicker, and in my experiments, it gives a much better result as well.

We’ll tap Continue here and give our Personal Voice a name. I’ll just call mine “Jacob’s Voice” so it’s easy to find later. Then we’ll start recording in a quiet and calm space using the phrases that appear on screen. You can choose a shorter version again if you like, but to be honest, the default length is really quick, and that’s what I’ll demo for you now.

We’ll tap Continue, press Record, and then read the on-screen text: I’m creating a Personal Voice with my iPhone. You can see that’s been recorded and approved — no background noise, nothing in the way — so we press Continue and carry on. Don’t worry, you don’t have to watch all of these, but just so you know, there are only 10 sentences to record. It doesn’t take long at all:

Does he know how to speak Spanish? He was named to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1970. Let’s grab a bite to eat.

Now I’ve finished recording those 10 phrases, it’s going to take less than a minute to process my Personal Voice. On iOS 18 this took several hours, but now — look at that — it’s literally finished already. Straight away I can preview this Personal Voice: This is Jacob’s voice. And yes, it really does sound a bit like me.

Now we can start using it across the phone. To put it to the test, I’ll go back a level to the main Accessibility screen and this time choose Live Speech. On here, I’ll make sure Jacob’s Voice is selected. To use Live Speech, just press your lock button three times anywhere on the phone. Then type a message, and your phone will read it aloud. In the past, this would use a Siri voice. But now, with Personal Voice, it reads in my own digital voice.

As soon as I press return on the keyboard, you’ll hear Jacob’s digital voice: Hi, it’s Jacob here. How are you doing?

It’s pretty crazy that it created that based on just 10 phrases I recorded in under a minute. This is such a powerful feature, and I think it can help so many people use their phones and access the world in new and exciting ways. Full credit to Apple — what an awesome tool.

And this is far from the only new thing in iOS 26. If you want to see what else your phone can do now that it just couldn’t do before, check out my channel down below and make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any more QuickTips. I’ll see you next time.