iMavis
Mavis is a simple app for iPhone and iPad for interacting with Apple’s built-in speech synthesizer. Due to a rather unfortunate naming collision and the policies of the App Store, the exact name of the application had to be changed.
Mavis was built to replace the built-in Live Speech app with something a bit more capable and user-friendly for those using speech synthesis daily. On the iPad, Mavis has been optimized for use with an external bluetooth keyboard.
At least one high quality system voice is required to use Mavis and it can use Apple’s Personal Voice as well.
Features At A Glance
History Repeat
Quickly repeat any of the last few phrases without having to retype them. There are simple keyboard shortcuts to control the selection.
Tab Complete
Quickly access frequent phrases by the tab key to suggest the best matches. Your list of phrases can be easily edited, refer to the Help Docs for more detailed information.
Pronunciations
English is a fickle beast, so you can edit the pronunciations of specific words so that it sounds how it should. This is most often useful with proper nouns, names and acronyms.
Soundbites
If you have done some voice banking, Mavis can play your exact voice from the recordings when you type the exact word or phrase in the soundbite.
Phone/FaceTime Integration
If you are making phone or FaceTime calls on your iPad/iPhone the audio generated by Mavis is automatically sent on the call, even with your microphone active. The other participants can hear you laugh or make other sounds, but you can quickly speak clearly with your voice synthesizer when you need to.
Soundbites do not work over FaceTime/Phone calls due to some limitations with iOS. When a call is active, soundbites will be synthesized rather than played back from the recordings.
Installing
As of May 2025, Mavis is available on the App Store for iPad and iPhone.
iMavis can use your Personal Voice if you have one, but you must first configure Apple’s Personal Voice settings withing the Accessiblity section to allow third-party applications to request Personal Voice permissions.
iOS Public TestFlight
iMavis has a public TestFlight version which is used to evaluate new features install it using TestFlight.
Documentation
More detailed information is available in the Help Docs.