Latest iOS 27 Developer Beta Enables Siri Voice customization sliders for Expressivity, Pace

My friend Sarah Perez reports for TechCrunch Apple has enabled the voice customization features for the new Siri. The company showed them off at WWDC last month, with the sliders enabled with this week’s release of iOS 27 developer beta 3.

“With the latest iOS 27 developer beta, Apple is giving testers an early look at one of the upcoming improvements to its AI-powered Siri: the ability to adjust how quickly and expressively the AI assistant speaks. In iOS 27 beta 3, out today, Apple has enabled the voice controls for ‘Pace’ and ‘Expressivity’ that were previously labeled as ‘Coming soon’ in the first developer beta releases,” Perez wrote. “The update is part of Apple’s broader effort to make Siri feel more natural and personal, as it rebuilds the assistant around generative AI. Like ChatGPT and others offering voice AI assistants, letting users customize how the AI sounds is an important aspect in helping connect people with the new technology.”

Expressivity is subjective—maybe you want Siri to be less friendly—but the Pace setting is relevant from an accessibility standpoint. Particularly for those with cognitive conditions which affect language processing, that a person now has the ability to slow down (or quicken) Siri’s speaking rate and cadence may well prove to be a de-facto accessibility feature. What’s more, Siri’s voice adjusts in real time, which means users get immediate feedback on their changes and can shift accordingly.

Apple says on the screen “you’ll hear this voice in Siri, Maps, and Safari.”

Four weeks removed since WWDC, and I’m still not running any of the OS 27 betas. On a personal level, the first week of July has proven as chaotic as the whole of June was, so my priorities haven’t included downloading developer software. Maybe that will change with the presumably imminent release of the public betas, but we’ll see how my life looks in the next few weeks. That said, I’m comfortable offering informed speculation on the usefulness of, say, natural language in Calendar and Reminders as well as the new Siri voice sliders. To me, these features have clear accessibility gains.