Two sliders — Pace and Expressivity, five levels each — were switched on in the July 6 developer beta, letting you dial Siri’s speed and emotional warmth with a live audio preview. A19 Pro devices only.
2026-07-06 · by Moe Ameen
In iOS 27 beta 3, released July 6, 2026, Apple switched on two voice controls for the redesigned Siri — Pace and Expressivity — that had been present but grayed out (labeled "Coming soon") in betas 1 and 2. They live in Settings > Siri > Voice, each offering five adjustment levels for the two natural voices currently available.
Pace controls how quickly or slowly Siri speaks. Expressivity controls how much emotion and emphasis the voice carries — a higher setting sounds more conversational and animated, a lower one flatter and more neutral. As soon as you start moving either slider, Siri plays a continuous audio sample that updates in real time so you can hear each change, then you tap the checkmark to save. Apple has said the chosen voice settings also carry over to spoken output in Apple Maps and Safari.
The feature was previewed at WWDC 2026 in June, where Apple showed a more conversational, Gemini-powered Siri as part of the next generation of Apple Intelligence. It is gated to hardware: the advanced on-device Siri model behind the natural voice needs at least 12GB of RAM, so the controls are limited to A19 Pro devices — the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air. Standard iPhone 17 models (8GB) do not get it. As a beta feature, exact behavior and availability can still change before the public release, which Apple has said arrives as a free update this fall.
The interesting part of this update, if you make content, is not Siri reading your texts — it is what "expressive AI voice" means for the videos you publish. Kompozy is where that plays out at production scale. Its Persona Shorts and Persona HeyGen formats generate talking-head avatar video with native, human-sounding text-to-speech driven by your AI Influencer persona, so the voice narrating your short is consistent across every clip you ship — the same identity, not a phone setting one viewer tweaked for themselves. Where iOS 27 lets one person adjust how Siri sounds to them, Kompozy fixes how your brand sounds to everyone.
Practically: script an idea in your voice through the Persona Brief, render a captioned Persona Short or a longer Persona HeyGen scene with avatar and TTS, prepend a generative VFX hook if you want the scroll-stopper, then fan the same piece into a carousel, blog recap, newsletter, and platform-native posts and schedule the set across nine platforms plus email and blog — all from one queue, rendered server-side on Trigger.dev so you approve a batch and walk away. And the news itself is searchable right now: drop "iOS 27 gives Siri custom pace and expressivity" into Kompozy and it turns one take on the trend into a blog explainer, a captioned short, a carousel, and native posts while people are still looking it up.
On a supported device running iOS 27 beta 3 or later, go to Settings > Siri > Voice. Pick a voice, then use the Pace and Expressivity sliders — each has five levels. Siri plays a live audio sample as you adjust, and you tap the checkmark to save.
The Pace and Expressivity controls are limited to A19 Pro devices — the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air — because the advanced on-device Siri voice model needs at least 12GB of RAM. The standard iPhone 17 (8GB) does not get them.
Pace sets how fast or slow Siri speaks. Expressivity sets how much emotion and emphasis the voice uses — a higher setting sounds more conversational and animated, a lower one more neutral and flat.
No. The Pace and Expressivity controls tune how Siri speaks to you on your device; they are not a narration or content-production tool. To generate expressive, on-brand voice for videos you publish, a content engine like Kompozy renders persona/avatar shorts with native text-to-speech and publishes them across platforms.