An AI voice assistant in Japanese on iPhone

The Japanese voice

Japanese is spoken by Supertonic, Orvena's second voice engine, which reads the written text without a pronunciation dictionary and covers 26 languages in one download. You choose one of ten voice styles, Female 1 to 5 and Male 1 to 5, and the style carries over to the other languages.

Orvena speaks Japanese replies in shorter pieces than other languages.

The download

The voices for Japanese and 25 other languages come in one pack of about 400 MB. It downloads after you unlock voice, together with a pack of about 345 MB for English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, and both finish in the background. You can remove the pack you do not need under Settings, then Voice.

Setting it up

Start a voice conversation with the waveform button in the message field. With Spoken language left on Automatic, Orvena listens in the language of the current conversation, or in the language of its menus when the conversation is new. To keep it on Japanese, open Settings and, in the Voice section, set Spoken language to Japanese.

The first time you use a language, iOS downloads its on-device speech recognition model, so the "Getting ready…" screen stays up a little longer that once. Orvena's language picker only offers languages that it can both hear and speak.

Answers in Japanese

Orvena's own model replies in the language you write or speak, message by message, so you can switch mid-conversation.

Apple Intelligence also supports Japanese, so on iOS 27 Orvena can answer with Apple's on-device model as well.

Siri and Japanese

Siri supports Japanese, so with Siri set to Japanese you can say "Orvena に聞いて" to hand Orvena a question, or "Orvena と話して" to start a voice conversation.

What you can ask

• Move my 3 pm meeting to tomorrow.
• What is the weather this weekend?
• Remind me to call the dentist tomorrow at 9.
• Find a pharmacy near me.
• How did I sleep last night?

Orvena shows what it did for each request, and anything consequential asks you first.

What stays on the iPhone

The voice is generated on the iPhone, and speech recognition runs on the device. With Orvena's own model, what you say and its answer stay on the phone; you choose whether a request goes to a cloud model. Live voice with your own OpenAI key is the one exception: it sends your audio to OpenAI, and it asks first.

Common questions

Is the Japanese voice free?

Voice conversations are part of Premium Unlock, a one-time purchase with no subscription. Typed chat in Japanese is free.

Does the Japanese voice assistant work offline?

Yes, once it is set up. With Orvena's own model and the voice pack downloaded, listening, answering and speaking all run on the iPhone. The first use of a language downloads Apple's recognition model for it.

Is the Orvena app in Japanese?

Yes. Its menus, settings and messages are available in Japanese, and it follows your iPhone's language.

Sources

• Apple Support: How to get the next generation of Apple Intelligence