The reason why iOS asks you to read specific things out loud is because of a thing called alignment - basically, it needs to map exactly sounds to exact phonemes. So if it’s making you say “apple”, it’s recording how you say “ae”, “puh”, and “l”.
When you expect it to take any random file, it needs to know specific things like, what’s the text, what is the time frame, when did the speaker speak in a normal voice vs a higher pitch or speed voice. Taking all of this information and created a voice is called “forced alignment” and that’s a field that’s well studied but not implemented on mobile phones as yet.
An alternative for you, if you want, say, Snoop Dog to be your Siri voice, is to actually use an AI generated Snoop Dog voice to say all the things that the Personal Voice feature expects and just play them out loud from your computer when setting up Personal voice. This assumes you use one of the many paid Snoop Dog AI voice companies out there.
Another way to get the voice you want is to just take a recording of someone, write the text of what they said and then feed it to a tool like the Gentle Forced Aligner - https://github.com/strob/gentle
This will give you enough material to then take it to AWS or Microsoft’s AI voice creator tools to create an AI voice. Then you can use that AI voice to say the same things that iOS Personal Voice wants you to say and again, play the correct recording when activating Personal Voice.
All of this assumes that is your end goal - Snoop Dogg as your Siri. Anything else, please let me know and I’ll help you with what you’re trying to achieve.
That looks cool! And… I think we can extend it to iOS and android apps. The benefit being drag and drop simplicity and sharing sheet access, instead of shortcuts, which have always felt wonky to me.
The problem with that to me at least, is that there’s no one uniform way to capture things. Notes and videos and images and files all need different contexts and views. I hate Pocket and similar services for this reason - it feels too “media” friendly, too focused on videos and links and PDF files. When most of my read later is text - articles and such.
What if you keep the file around but write to it and zero size it? Does chrome still download the file again?