Apple quietly flipped a switch testers have been waiting on since June. iOS 27 beta 3, released today, activates two voice controls – “Pace” and “Expressivity” – that had sat grayed out under a “Coming soon” label since the first developer builds shipped. Testers can now drag a slider and change how fast the AI-rebuilt Siri talks and how much emotional inflection creeps into its voice, testing each setting against a demo phrase, “You have one new message.” Small feature, big signal: an assistant Apple rebuilt almost entirely around generative AI is now tuned the way a person tunes a car radio, and that tuning exercise is what NewsTrackerToday pulls forward as the more interesting story than the beta note itself.
The controls trace back to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, where the company first showed a Siri overhaul built around generative AI rather than the scripted command system it ran on for over a decade. Beyond a male or female voice, users can now pick among accents, then adjust pace and expressiveness independently.
Liam Anderson reads the competitive gap plainly: “OpenAI got here first, and by a wide margin. ChatGPT let users adjust warmth and enthusiasm back in December 2025, alongside a full style menu – friendly, professional, candid, quirky, and more. That’s not just a voice tweak. It changes how the assistant frames information, not only how it sounds saying it. Apple’s Pace and Expressivity sliders are a real step, but they’re a subset of what OpenAI already shipped seven months ago.” That gap between a voice tweak and a full personality system is what NewsTrackerToday breaks down as the actual distance Apple still has to close. Bear in mind, Apple ships to hundreds of millions of devices at once – distribution Apple has, and OpenAI doesn’t, at least not natively.
Sophie Leclerc, who covers the technology sector, walks through why the timing matters more than the feature list: “Apple is threading Siri through nearly every interaction surface on the phone now – swipe down from the Dynamic Island, tap the side button, talk to a dedicated Siri app, or just start speaking. That’s a deliberate bet that voice becomes the default interface, not a fallback one. Once voice is everywhere, tone customization stops being cosmetic.”
Not everything in beta 3 landed cleanly. Some testers on social media reported losing access to the new Siri entirely after updating, or watching their phone begin re-indexing personal data from scratch – typically the first step in prepping on-device search for the AI assistant. A refreshed Reminders app icon rode along in the same build, cosmetic and unrelated to the AI work.
Nobody will remember the icon by next week. What people will remember is whether the new Siri sounds like a person choosing its own tone or like a settings menu wearing a voice. That distinction, more than any single slider, is what News Tracker Today reads through as the actual product question iOS 27’s later betas will have to answer.
Does a pace slider close the gap with ChatGPT? Not on its own. But it’s the kind of incremental catch-up move Apple has repeated since committing to the generative rebuild: ship a control, watch adoption, expand it. That pattern, more than the beta note itself, is what NewsTrackerToday documents underneath this release – a company trying to make up ground it lost by shipping late in the first place.
Three things worth tracking as later betas roll out: whether Apple expands the style menu beyond pace and expressivity toward something closer to OpenAI’s full personality settings; whether this week’s access and re-indexing bugs get resolved before general release; and whether Apple ties any of this to a broader Siri marketing push once iOS 27 ships publicly.
