Deleting unwanted voiceover voices in sequoia

By Studio Jay, 18 June, 2025

Forum

macOS and Mac Apps

Hi Everyone,
I was trying out some of the voiceover voices in sequoia, and I had a couple issues.

First of all, when I went in to Voiceover Utilities/Speech/Voices, while navigating through the voices in the table, voiceover says speak sample, but when I VO space on it, it downloads the voice instead of playing a sample. How can I play the sample without downloading the voice?
Secondly, as a result of this, I downloaded several voices that I don't want, and I can't find a way to delete them.
I should mention that I am talking about the primary voice and not the additional voices.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Kind regards,

Jay

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Comments

Interact to get to the play button

When you are in the voices list, interact with the voice name and move right you will hear speak sample button. I have no idea how to delete the voices.

Deleting voices does seem to be impossible, even in macOS 26.

I can't find any way to delete voices, except for reinstalling the operating system which would probably delete them, but who wants to do that? 😉 I really don't know if there is a way to delete voices.

Very frustrating

I spent about an hour on the phone with Apple tech support this morning and they couldn't find a way to delete the voices either. Very annoying since they take up valuable space on the hard drive, especially the enhanced voices.
Thanks for the help.

Actions Menu

I ran into this problem as well, and someone running the Apple Accessibility email address told me to use the actions menu. I'm surprised the people on the phone couldn't figure it out. Move to the voice name in the voice list and bring up the actions menu with VO-Command-Space or another custom shortcut you've defined. There should be a delete option in the menu. I'm learning this is how you interact with many things in macOS these days, so if you can't figure out how to do something, chances are you can focus on the item and bring up the actions menu to find a solution to your particular problem.

Thank you so much

Hi,
Thanks so much for this. Worked perfectly, and to think it was as simple as that.
Really appreciate everyone's help.

There is no action menu

I move to the voices list, and I use the command for the action menu and nothing happens.

Select a Voice

Interact with the voice list and move to the voice you want. You should be able to open the actions menu and find the delete option. You may need to interact with the row containing the buttons to speak sample and/or select it, though I don't think this is strictly necessary.

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