With 26.4 beta 2 announce the time is no longer using the voice I have selected. I am using Australian English Siri 2, however it will speak using American English Samantha. I also have the system voice set the Australian English Siri 2 which is never honored. In fact, with that setting, Speak announcement never happens. Speak announcements has been broken since 26.0. There are several other issues with text to speach. Basically, TTS works for the most part if you use the default Samantha voice. Various things break when using other voices. FB22035712 -- "Announce the time not using selected voice" FB22035743 -- "Speak announcements only works if Samantha voice is selected." I will note that FB20933185 -- "Siri voices break System voice UI" appears fixed in 26.4 beta 2, in that the UI is no longer broken with Siri voices, but now Siri voices aren't honored.

Having voice control enabled now puts three menu bar items. The blue icon it has always had, supplemented with an orange microphone and an orange dot next to control center. I know this orange icon is there to notify me that a third-party application is accessing the microphone, but this is a first-party system service that is always running. If another app starts accessing the microphone I won't know, since the orange icon is always there anyway. It's like a California prop 65 warning. Maybe it was a good idea in principal but with it being ubiquitous everyone just ignores it. Siri is also always accessing the microphone, but doesn't trigger this orange eyesore because it's a system service. Both Siri and voice control are always on in the background, are first-party system services that must be specifically enabled, and both have their own menu bar icon that can be removed if not wanted. This orange icon with voice control potentially introduces MORE risk by training me to ignore the orange icon. Please return to the pre-26.3 behaviour of using this orange icon for third-party apps and not first-party system services. FB22036182 -- "Voice control causes extra menu bar icon"

I'm unable to sign in to Feedback Assistant on macOS. I have two Apple accounts and neither will sign in. I am able to sign in via the website. With the desktop app I'm getting a rather generic error message: "Unable to sign in to Feedback Assistant Thank you for your patience. Please try again later." This started this morning.

I have filed bug reports on this to no avail, so I am bringing it up here hoping someone at Apple will address this. Since the first beta of 26.3, with voice control enabled there are now two icons in the menu bar (*plus an orange dot in full screen) that never go away. That orange microphone isn't serving its intended purpose to notify me that something is accessing my microphone if it is always displayed. I use voice control extensively, so it is nearly always on. In every prior version of macOS, the orange icon was not on for voice control. Even if voice control is not listening but simply enabled in system settings, the orange icon will be there. And there is no need for this icon to be on for a system service that is always listening. This orange icon in the menu bar at all times is incredibly irritating, as it takes up valuable space to the right of the notch, and causes other actual useful menu bar items to be hidden. As well, if some other application on my system were to turn on the mic and start recording me I would never know since that orange icon is always on. It also places an orange dot next to the control center icon taking up even more of the precious little menu bar real estate. Please fix this! Either exempt voice control (as Siri is always listening and it doesn't get the orange icon) or exempt all system services, or give me a way to turn this off. If you cannot tell, I find this incredibly annoying and frustrating.

When asking Siri to run a shortcut, it will spawn two processes called BackgroundShortcutRunner that do not die when the shortcut is done running. If the Siri window is on screen when I speak to have the shortcut run it does not spawn those two processes. However if the Siri window is not on screen when I speak, the Siri window appears and spawns these two processes. The two processes do not terminate once the shortcut is done running. I now have over 200 these processes since rebooting three days ago to install 26.4. FB22015192

Every new build of macOS 26 further breaks some part of text-to-speech or voice control. I have filed multiple bug reports on this, yet the situation gets worse, not better, with each new build. I am begging you to fix this! I am disabled and rely on these features to work. Accessibility in macOS is more than 50% of my reasons for choosing Macs over Windows. Here's some of what is currently broken: Speak announcements only works if the Samantha voice is selected. If other voices are selected either the announcements don't speak, or they default to the Samantha voice. This became broken with 26.1. Announce the time only works with some voices. I would like to use Australian English Siri 2 but with that voice selected it defaults to Samantha. This became broken with 26.4. With voice control enabled there are two menu bar icons. The blue voice control icon and an orange microphone "an application is accessing the microphone" icon. This orange icon started appearing with 26.3. For four years of macOS releases, the orange warning didn't apply to system services. And note that with voice control enabled on iOS there is no orange icon. It wastes valuable menu bar space and defeats its purpose. With that orange icon always being there I have no indication if a nefarious app starts recording me. This became broken with 26.3. Overlay shows numbers even when it is set to none. This has been broken since at least 14.0. I don't remember if it was broken in prior versions but it has been broken in every version since 14.0. The voice control control center widget is defective. If voice control is not in the menu bar (for example if I've said "Siri turn off voice control") using the control center widget to turn it on brings about the orange icon, but not the blue icon actually used for controlling voice control. If you do have the blue voice control icon and use control center to turn off voice control the blue icon stays but voice control is not enabled. This became broken in 26.0, was fixed in 26.2, broke again in 26.4. When using voice control to edit text (aka dictation mode) saying "go to the end of the line" invariably goes to the beginning of the line. Once in a blue moon it will go to the end, but there is no rhyme or reason and it's rare that it does. Since this bug was added it has worked correctly exactly twice. This became broken in 26.3 (possibly 26.4). I know I am missing some issues. Voice control and text-to-speech have new bugs with each new build of macOS 26. My main Mac is being repaired and once I get it back I'll be installing macOS 15 Sequoia on it because of these issues. These issues stop me from buying a new Mac because any new Mac will only run the broken macOS 26. I file bug reports on each build when I discover another new issue, but these reports seemingly go unread. I would suggest Apple get a focus group of disabled people together and do research into how we use macOS. Find what's broken and what works. And if Apple does this I would be glad to be a part of that group. My place, or yours. Accessibility at one time was something Apple was proud of. It was some Apple showed off. But now, I'm not so sure. It's starting to look like Apple doesn't care. I hope I'm wrong, and that Apple does care, so... Please, Apple. I am begging you. Fix broken Text-To-Speech and Voice Control!

I have filed 27 bug reports against macOS using Feedback Assistant and none have had any sort of follow-up. I'm wondering if anyone at Apple looks at these reports? A few of these involve accessibility features that are not working (for example: speak announcements doesn't work -- and yes, my feedback is much more detailed than "doesn't work"). I would have thought issues with accessibility would be a high priority for Apple to fix quickly. Another report is that Grapher uses black text on dark gray making it very difficult to see the formula you enter. This should be a one-line code fix. These two, and 25 other bug reports have seemingly been ignored. Several of these reports indicate more than 10 similar reports, yet go unfixed. Leading me back to my opening question -- does anyone at Apple read these reports? I'd like to think I'm helping Apple to deliver a more perfect product but I feel like I'm wasting my time writing detailed bug reports. Is there another way to bring these to Apple's attention?

I have reported this bug on multiple macOS version and it never gets fixed, so I am posting it here in hopes someone at Apple will see this and fix the issue. I use voice control extensively (in fact, it is THE reason I use Macs. I am an amputee, and voice control makes life much easier and there is nothing even close on Windows (or Linux, but Linux is barely usable for people with with two arms)). Voice control has a setting to have a screen overlay numbers, names, or a grid, to help indicate what item you're referring to. There is an option to have no overlay. However, even when overlay is set to None, the numbers overlay still appears on screen, even when I haven't triggered something by voice. If I right click on the desktop, for example, the numbers appear on the menu. This bug has been in macOS for as long as I can remember. I really hope someone at Apple can fix this. There are quite a few other bugs I've reported with Feedback assistant over the years that go unfixed, this is one of the more annoying ones.