Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
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.
I started running developer beta 1 on a spare iPhone the day it came at WWDC. It proved so stable, and Siri AI so useful, that I moved my primary iPhone 17 Pro to the iOS 27 betas with beta 2. But I’ve more or less been living on iOS 27 developer betas for a month now. If you’re as reckless as me, you’re probably doing so already too. If you’re not, you should probably at least wait for the public betas, the first of which I’ll bet is imminent. The stability of these betas right out of the gate is proof that this really is a Snow Leopard-type fix-and-improve-the-foundations year. I love it.
As for the new Siri voices, I think both of the new voices that are available so far are very good. Voice 1 is female and voice 2 is male; I’ve spent days with both but prefer the female voice. (I’d pay a fortune for a male voice that sounded like HAL 9000; I don’t like this guy who sounds, I don’t know, like a child psychologist or something. I don’t want “friendly”, which to me sounds saccharine and phony from a computer. The female voice sounds more emotionally removed, and thus honest, to me.)
Credit to Apple here. Now that these sliders are available, I have to say they nailed the defaults. After a month using them without the sliders, I thought that once the settings became available I might want to tone expressivity down one notch and/or turn the pace up one notch. But, no. A little less expressivity doesn’t make voice 1 sound less phony to me — it makes her sound a tad stoned. And even one click more pace sounds too fast for me — hurried, not curt. Nailing defaults is hard and I think Apple nailed these.
(The system dictionary definition of curt: “rudely brief”. That’s what I want from an AI voice. That’s a computer being honest about what it is.)
