r/MacOSBeta • u/pdfu • 21h ago
Feature Apple's hidden Siri “Voice Pad” blends 13 voices, colorful gradients, and an interactive soundscape to help you “tune Siri’s voice”
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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.
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.
