May as well throw my issues in here, though they seem minor in comparison - most, but not all, of the 'siri' voices will not adjust tempo - they are stuck on default which is so slow its near unusable, which is a shame as they are overall better voices. In fact, my frustration with text-to-speech during my homework brought me here hahaha! Oh Apple lol I wrote it super late at night after a day of homework. I hope they fix it.Д®dit: Updated wording, grammar, other errors in my post. My most effective way of getting through my school textbooks has become a frustrating feature to use. Text highlight while reading along is way out of sync (worse than in Catalina).Selecting text produces the least amount of errors for text-to-speech feature, however is the least efficient because you have to manually select your text over and over again.Using option+escape should just read from A to Z, but doing that is just buggy. I no longer feel comfortable using the option+escape shortcut keys to activate text-to-speech because it's glitchy.Text-to-speech will go from reading in English, then pronounce a Spanish name in Spanish, then continue to read the rest of the selected paragraph in butchered Spanish I've been reading my biology textbook which has lots of in-text citations to other scientists. Text-to-speech will suddenly change languages when it comes across a foreign name.For example, text-to-speech would read the previous sentence but random mispronounce a word like 'pro' 'noun' 'see'

As u/petergarner1 stated, the voice tends to pronounce words incorrectly and inconsistently.

Reading books in Books uses the default system voice vs reading online articles and PDFs uses custom Siri voice.

I have to restart my laptop for text-to-speech to work again

If I stop the text-to-speech midway (such as to stop and write down notes), the feature will sometimes not start up again.

Siri voice stops randomly and sometimes even skips whole parts.

WTF? This doesn't happen often, but it does happen regularly. For instance, it just pronounced the word 'priorities,' as 'prior' 'eye' 'ties'. I also find that it sometimes mispronounces words in weird and inconsistent ways (and I'm not even talking about the long-standing mispronunciation of homonyms). My English translations often have several French words (the names of institutions, for instance) and I've gotten used to Alex's hilarious mispronunciation of French.

I wish there were a way to turn this off and just have it use a single language. The system seems to look at a paragraph and try to work out how many potential foreign words there in deciding which voice to use-to very poor effect thus far in my experience. I'm a French-to-English translator, so I appreciate the attempt at language switching, but it's not particularly smart in Big Sur. But I agree that the feature has changed in very odd ways. This works more or less the same for me in Big Sur. I mostly use text to speech as a proofreading feature, setting a keyboard command to speak a selected block of text (I still just use the Alex voice). Mind you the 'bug' that the 'speak text' menu item doesn't use an available Siri voice is still there. 'jumped to top of the page') before French Siri reads English text. This can lead to hilarious situations, where English Siri will give some information (e.g. If you configure Siri in your system language, Siri will be used instead, but again only in the system language if your system is set to French, a default French voice will be heard even though you might only have an English voice configured) Now in Big Sur even this has gotten worse - Siri is still invoked for 'speak text under cursor', but using the keyboard shortcut invokes the default voice of your current system language (e.g. When using the 'Speak Text' menu option available in most programs, macOS would default to a built-in voice in your chosen language. In Catalina it was possible to select Siri as your voice for text-to-speech, however the voice could only be used for the 'speak text under cursor' or 'speak text on shortcut' commands. As is tradition, Apple has fixed some things with Big Sur and made others worse - case in point text-to-speech:

Shortcut text to speech mac