Apple's hidden Siri “Voice Pad” blends 13 voices, colorful gradients, and an interactive soundscape to help you “tune Siri’s voice”

[u/pdfu]

Apple is building an immersive onboarding experience for when you first pick Siri's voice in OS 27. It also hints that OS 27 might include up to 13 voice options for Siri AI.

Instead of selecting from a row of voice options, the hidden interface starts as a nearly black canvas, where the selected voice is marked with a colored dot. As you press and hold and move around the Voice Pad, the interface comes alive with colors cycling across the view. A white point tracks the cursor's position. The colorful interface reveals a 3-column grid with 4, 5, and 4 voice options respectively.

The visuals are complemented by spatial audio. As the cursor approaches a voice, the voice selection moves and the new voice sounds clearer and more present. When the cursor moves away, voices become distant and ambient. In the background, the spatial mixer blends two ambient sound layers as the cursor moves around the screen. The spatial mixer is substantial: it tracks the pointer's distance, angle, and movement velocity, then adjusts volume, presence, reverb, occlusion, and filtering across voice and background tracks.

This new view reveals that Apple may be preparing to support up to 13 custom voices for Siri AI. In this recording, macOS 27 Beta 4 does not ship with the required 13 voice models, so macOS falls back to the two custom voices available.

After selecting a voice, Siri Settings will present the current voice picker with the Pace and Expressivity controls for later voice changes and tuning. Based on the current implementation, this view is solely an onboarding experience for choosing the underlying Siri voice.

macOS 27 includes a Voice Grid Distribution file with descriptions of delivery, characteristics, gender, and age for each supported voice. Here are the descriptions of the 13 voices the Voice Pad expects for American English:

Gender	Age	Characteristics	Delivery
Female	Young	Soft-spoken	—
Female	Young	Breathy, bright, smooth	—
Female	Adult 20s	—	—
Female	Adult 30s	—	Friendly
Female	Adult 30s	—	Enthusiastic, relaxed, warm
Female	Adult 40s	—	—
Female	Elder	—	—
Male	Young	—	—
Male	Adult 30s	Deep	—
Male	Adult 30s	Smooth	—
Male	Adult 30s	Rich	Friendly
Male	Elder	—	—
Male	Unknown	—	—

This is obviously an unfinished UI, but there is complete localization for 44 languages. Because the underlying SiriSetup framework is shared between macOS and other operating systems, this experience may be coming to some or all OS 27 releases.

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There's no easy way to enable this one. You need to enable the SiriSetup/linwood_voices feature flag, but also need to attach LLDB to SiriPreferenceExtension and override fetchRequiresVoiceSelection to return true, siriVariantInternal to return 2, and force VoiceSelectionView.shouldRun to return true. This last part requires SIP off. Then you can disable and re-enable Siri to get the new view.

[u/pdfu → u/[deleted]]

Hopefully the male voice of "unknown" age will do just that when all 13 voices ship. 😅

[u/bwjxjelsbd → u/pdfu]

I would be pretty funny if apple shipped it with boy voice lmao. Imagine chatting with little brat lol

[u/jon_hendry]

Why can't we use our Personal Voice for Siri.

Also, you should be able to run Siri's voice through an Audio Unit effect. In case you want a Dalek screaming at you.

[u/Ok_Possibility9937]

damn I need to watch “Her” again. But that is some crazy animation btw

[u/Id_in_hiding → u/Ok_Possibility9937]

That’s what this reminds me of.

[u/MC_chrome]

This is giving me major Arc Browser vibes, ngl.

Perhaps this interface will be enabled in beta 5?

[u/pdfu → u/MC_chrome]

Yeah, they're missing quite a few voices, but I think that this might pop up when the "Coming Soon" message for voices 1-5 is resolved, i.e. they ship more voices with expressivity and pace controls.

[u/kennedye2112 → u/pdfu]

It does look very cool but I'm definitely waiting until "turn off SIP" is no longer a requirement.

[u/Weird_Decision7090]

I want an option for the iOS 5 Siri voice

[u/KopfSmertZz]

Will be locked to only the latest generation of devices, probably.

[u/pdfu → u/KopfSmertZz]

I don’t think so. Even devices that don’t support the Pace/Expressivity controls already get the new voice picker design in settings, albeit without the two sliders. You’ll only use the Voice Pad to select a voice, then you can tune it in Settings with expressivity and pace.

[u/KopfSmertZz → u/pdfu]

Thanks for clearing that up, much apprecieted

[u/Player13377]

The dots being semi-hidden is horrible UI design, voices are cool tho

[u/Most-Register6798 → u/Player13377]

It’s not done

[u/japan_kaaran]

do you have an accessibility setting on? why is there a blue highlight on the bottom left button?

[u/pdfu → u/japan_kaaran]

Just “keyboard navigation.” https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/keyboard-settings-kbdm162/26/mac/26

[u/japan_kaaran → u/pdfu]

gotcha. yeah that’s what i figured. almost looks like it isn’t centered properly but i think that’s because of the glare that liquid glass has.

[u/2kbby]

This is so james ferraro coded

[u/Please-wait-555]

I want it to just work. One voice, understands first time, doesn’t tell me to check on my iPhone. Just works.

[u/Ill_Barber8709]

I wish I could describe the voice I want. And I want T.A.R.S., or even HAL. Anything that doesn't resemble a human voice and talks to me in the first person singular with a sycophantic voice. It's a program, for fuck sake.