Apple is giving developers their first real taste of a more customizable Siri. With the release of iOS 27 beta 3, two voice controls that had been sitting dormant since the first developer betas are now live: “Pace” and “Expressivity.” The first controls how fast Siri talks, the second controls how much emotion its voice carries.
As TechCrunch reported, both settings appear as sliders, and as you adjust them, Siri reads out a short sample phrase like “You have one new message” so you can hear the difference in real time. It’s a small but practical touch that makes the testing process feel more intuitive.
Apple first showed these controls at WWDC 26 in June. The idea is to let users go beyond picking a male- or female-sounding voice, giving them actual control over how the assistant communicates. That shift matters because voice AI is only useful if people feel comfortable talking to it, and a one-size-fits-all delivery has always been one of the biggest friction points.
This update fits into Apple’s wider effort to rebuild Siri around generative AI. The new version of Siri is tightly woven into iOS 27, and users will be able to trigger it in several ways:
- Speaking directly to the assistant
- Swiping down from the Dynamic Island and typing
- Pressing the phone’s side button
- Opening the new stand-alone Siri app
The voice customization push also puts Apple in more direct competition with OpenAI. ChatGPT already lets users adjust warmth, enthusiasm, base tone, and conversational style, options that rolled out in December 2025. Those settings affect not just how ChatGPT sounds, but how it structures its responses. Apple’s current controls are narrower, focused on delivery rather than personality, but the direction is clearly the same.
The rest of iOS 27 beta 3 is relatively light on changes. The Reminders app gets an updated icon, and that’s about it for visible updates. There are some rough edges, too. A number of developers posting on X have reported losing access to the new Siri after installing the update, or seeing their phone restart its data indexing process from scratch. That kind of issue is normal for early betas, but worth knowing if you’re planning to install it on a device you rely on daily.
For now, the Pace and Expressivity controls are a developer-only feature. Apple has not said when they will reach the general public, but given they were already previewed at WWDC 26, the public iOS 27 release later this year is the most likely window.
