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When I was using the old Pythonista app on iOS 8, I started using the speech library to create live listening tasks for French classes. After first using the basic voices I decided to upgrade to the high quality voices, which are sometimes actually better than the hammy voice acting that comes with a lot of school books.

At some point or other, I upgraded to iOS 9, and I don't know whether I used text to speech between then and buying the new Pythonista with both 2 and 3.

So I started using text to speech with the speech library again last week, and the low quality voices were coming out. I reinstalled the old Pythonista... same thing.

I've fiddled about with the settings on the iPad and checked the narrator in the web browser, and it's using whichever voice I like there. But Pythonista always seems to drop back to the first voice for the given language code, which is always low quality.

What's going on? Does anyone have a workaround?

No suggestions? I'm starting a masters in Computer-Assisted Language Learning and I'm really interested in being able to look at the use of voice sythesis in the classroom as part of it.

Seems to be an ios9.3 bug:
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/43718

You could also try your hand at objc to see if there is a different voice or methods not showing up in speech module.

Here is an objc example that you could modify...
https://gist.github.com/8381f7a28dbfade5ce1e1a69329ac4e5

I have also read about some people switching back to the low quality via the settings app, then deleting/redownloading the enhanced.

Aw boo. This an iPad mini 1, and iOS 10 won't be available on it, so it looks like I'm going to be stuck with this bug for the rest of time.