- Which iPhones can do it
- The two sliders that matter
- Why dictation improves too
Siri has sounded like Siri for well over a decade. You could pick an accent and a gender, and that was the extent of it – everyone with a British Siri got the same British Siri.
iOS 27 finally loosens that up. On the right hardware, you can adjust how fast Siri speaks and how much expression it puts into the delivery. The catch is that this one is genuinely hardware-limited, and not in the usual “you need a recent iPhone” way.
What you need
Voice customization runs on a beefier on-device speech model, and right now that model only runs on the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone Air. Every other iPhone that supports Siri AI still gets the new voices – it just doesn’t get the sliders. Note that you’ll also need Siri AI enabled in settings, which is opt-in while it’s still in beta.
The two sliders
Head to Settings > Siri > Voice. All devices will see the Variations and Voices sections, allowing you to switch up accent and tone. But those new devices we mentioned earlier should see even more…
Pace controls how quickly Siri speaks. Slower helps if you use Siri for directions or reading messages aloud in the car. Faster suits anyone who just wants the answer ASAP.
Expressivity controls emphasis and delivery. Turn it down for something clipped and neutral, up for something more animated. The higher end works better now that Siri holds proper conversations rather than firing off one-line replies.
Try a few combinations, ask Siri something with a bit of length to it, and adjust from there.
Dictation gets better as a side effect
The same on-device model powers system-wide dictation on these iPhones, and it’s noticeably more accurate. Better natural language understanding means fewer mistakes with spelling, punctuation and capitalization – the stuff that used to make dictated messages a chore to clean up.
You don’t need to turn anything on for this. It comes with the hardware if you’re on one of those models we mentioned earlier.