First off, two things:
1. Please do not hijack this post saying you have a similar issue, only with your watch.
2. Note that my following comments are based on iOS, *not!* with the issue a lot have experienced on WatchOS. This is on an iPhone, not a watch.
The above 2 things said, this is driving me insane! I'm not one normally for bad-mouthing Apple, but this is flat out becoming adimantly rediculous!
I have an iPhone 10S, (or as some call it, XS; - same thing.)
I normally use the Siri Male American English voice both for Siri, and also as my actual Voiceover voice of choice.
Lately, it seems like inconsistently, totally at random, although it seems to happen more when I either have to restart Voiceover for some stupid reason or another, or if I have to totally reboot my phone, again, for some stupid reason or another, my Siri voice goes ape crap on me and ceases to work. Usually when this happens, I get reverted back to the compact Samantha voice, not even the high quality premium version of Samantha. Trust me, it sounds God aweful in my opinion! OK, it's not Fred by any means, but... LOL!
Usually, at this point when this happens, I go into Voiceover settings, Speech, and under voice, I make sure the Siri male is selected.
Usually it is, even though, when I double tap on it, nothing happens. Usually, for something like this, it's because the voice somehow isn't downloaded. I used my actions rotor but have no choice like, "Download" aside from, "Activate". Obviously though, if I double tap when set to activate, nothing at all happens.
If I flick right one time past the voice name, in this case again, Siri Male, there's absolutely no download button like there would be normally, if the voice for some reason wasn't downloaded.
Sometimes, though rarely, I can reboot the phone by holding the side button, and volume up, then double tapping on slide to power off, waiting a few seconds, then re-powering on the phone, and this will cause the download button beside the voice name to appear. Usually when this happens, I can double tap, redownload the voice, then get it switched until it fiddlefudges again. In fact, just as I was typing this, the download button wasn't there, and now all of a sudden, it just finally after God knows how long of the phone being booted reappeared, and now is redownloading as I type. This is absolutely crazy! I dono what on God's green earth this thing thinks it's doing.
Also, I noticed this happens almost 100 percent of the time when doing an iOS update. For example, when I went from iOS 13.1 to 13.2, it did it, and then just today, when the 13.2.2 update came out, it did it again.
This definitely didn't used to happen before 13.1. Even in just plain 13.0, this didn't happen.
Between that, and the watch having issues, I won't much go there as stated before, but we'll just leave it to say, with this happening on the watch as well in the past, things just seem to be regressing more than getting fixed.
I'm not one to normally complain, but come on Apple! Really? Seriously speaking? This is becoming flat out annoying! Unfortunately, there really isn't much a nicer way I can say it; I wish that there were so, but there isn't.
I just wonder if anyone else on iOS, again, not on Watch OS. That's for another post, please don't hijack this one... but on iOS specifically, has anyone in the last 2 or so updates seen this when trying to use the siri voices either male or female US American English as your Voiceover voice? If so, what did you wind up doing to fix it, if anything?
The odd thing is, I have other voices like Alex, Tom, Ava, Victoria, etc downloaded, and they're not breaking. It's only those 2 Siri voices. I mean, OK, come on here! What gives! I could see it, if this were still in beta cycle, but it's not. I don't wanna switch to Android, but I will if things keep going down hill like this.