Apple Added Voice Speed and Expressiveness Settings for Siri in iOS 27 Beta

Apple in the new beta version of iOS 27 for developers has added to the voice assistant Siri the ability to regulate the speed and expressiveness of speech — according to 3DNews, citing findings in the fresh system build.

What changed for Siri

• The beta version of iOS 27 for developers introduced a setting for Siri's speech speed
• You can also adjust the expressiveness (intonational coloring) of the assistant's voice
• The change was discovered in a test build, currently available only to developers

Why this matters for voice assistants

Apple has been gradually transitioning Siri to generative artificial intelligence technologies for several years, promising more natural and personalized speech and understanding of conversation context. Competitors — Google with a version of its voice assistant based on Gemini and Amazon with Alexa+ — are also betting on the fact that a voice interface should sound more lively and flexible, rather than like a pre-recorded set of phrases. The ability to finely tune speech speed and expressiveness is a small, but telling step in this direction: it gives the user more control over how the assistant sounds, instead of a single standard voice.

What this means

The setting for Siri's speech speed and expressiveness is a seemingly routine update, but it fits into Apple's overall trajectory: to gradually make the voice assistant more natural and customizable as more modern AI models are integrated into it.