There is a bug that Apple hasn't been able to fix. Ever since the first iOS 13.0 release, Siri (male or female) will work with VoiceOver and Spoken Content services for a while but eventually crashes. Once Siri's voice crashes, Spoken Content features stop working; VoiceOver at least has the decency to fallback to Samantha. Siri voices will then appear on the list as if they aren't downloaded. Sometimes you can even redownload them and have the working again for a little bit, but they'll eventually crash and stop working again.
Unfortunately the only way I have been able to solve this problem and have Siri voices working all the time with VoiceOver and Spoken Content, is by factory resetting my iPhone and iPad and setting them up as New devices. The moment I restore from a backup, whatever is causing Siri to crash gets restored as well. Something when restoring backups or transferring settings from another devices is what is causing this problem that has plagued us for many, many months.
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You are not the only one!
Although I am late to the party in replying to your post. I have been experiencing strange things happening with Siri and VoiceOver, downloaded voices under spoken content, automations that use Siri voices. There is no end to the list of issues I am facing, voiceover focus suddenly jumps to the status bar and the only way to get out is lock/ unlock the phone. VoiceOver speech instead of on my BT, suddenly shifts to the inear speaker and when trying to send a voice message to apple support when allowing microphone access; voiceover dies and cannot be heard; have to take sighted help to get things running again. VoiceOver stops speaking suddenly. What got me here is this issue I am facing: https://www.applevis.com/forum/ios-ipados/updated-trouble-automations-when-triggered-shortcuts-ios-166
The latest phone I have is iPhone 12
Yes, these issues were transfered from my SE when restoring from iCloud!
Issue has resurfaced in 17.1!
Look it's 2023 and your post is dated 2020 and we are on IOS 17.1. I created automations that use a Siri voice to speak text. I downloaded these voices from Settings/ accessibility/ spoken content/ voices/ English
The Voices I downloaded are : Australia, Siri Voice 2 and United States, Siri Voice 2 and 5.
Voices are downloaded and appear and can be selected in the speak text action when you expand the Speak Text option by swiping up/ down to get the more option.
After setting the automation up with the selected Siri voices, I am now expecting the automation to run and speak the text with the Siri voice I selected for the automation. However, the voice defaults to Karen for Australia and Samantha for US and when I check t=for the voices under Settings/ accessibility/ Spoken Content/ Voices/ English it is showing that the voices aren't downloaded by which it says download Siri Voice where as earlier it said Siri voice using X,MB.
No solution found, has also been reported on redit for IOS 13