iOS/iPadOS 27 Beta 4 Megathread

I think I have gotten so used to the bug in iOS 27 where voiceOver sounds like it's lacking bass, that I can't really tell if the issue is fixed or not. Perhaps someone else can help confirm if this is the case?
Otherwise things seem pretty stable right now.

No, it is definitely not fixed. I have an old iPod touch next to me and the sound is much better than on my phone. And I also have some recordings of my phone and it sounded much better there. But the sound volume is at least fixed. And another thing is that we finally can use the old voices from iOS 10, which were used in Siri at this time. For English this is the Aaron voice.

This is the only thing stopping me from updating to the beta, that and voiceover dropping off toward the end of sentences. I assume everyone's fed back on this voice issue?

My worry is it's a lower quality voice that is designed to be more responsive, so feature not a bug.

Greetings from Montreal!

VO is still wonky but I am not experiencing fade-outs or clipping on my I Phone 16 pro max.

Some downloaded voices in my rotor won’t play even if I erase them and download them again.

On the positive side Siri is phenomenal and in the few messages I dictated either on WhatsApp or I Message she got it 100% correct, so I’m very pleased about that although in the past I preferred to type messages just to be safe. It’s unfortunate that when making the effort to report issues they are ignored. This makes us as developer beta testers look bad and just frustrates the public beta users too. Lots of work has yet to be done.

Best from marc in Montreal

With limited testing, it seems that the double dictation I've been observing when dictating text into the Messages app seems to be fixed. Prior to this update, almost everything I dictated using the two finger double tap to start and stop dictation was repeated twice.

We'll see if this holds up.

--Pete

I had seen this issue in the last beta. The problem was when I hit the side button to wake up my phone, Voiceover wouldn't speak. I would have to ask Siri to turn up the volume. This was often fixed by a reboot, so it wasn't so bad.

Now with this latest beta, each time I hit the side button to wake the phone, Voiceover is silent. I've rebooted with no luck.

--Pete

For me, this beta is very stable, actually could forget I'm on a beta, the only issue I'm having which hasn't stopped me using the iPhone like normal is that when I'm playing media with wired earpods, voiceover becomes quite clippy, but its not missing words out, just clipping what its saying, other than that I've not had any issues.
I still like how the system sounds are louder, I've been aware of more notifications, VoiceOver sounds better than it did, all though not like it was in 26

Voiceover now says actions available after every text and not on elements that have actions. So I turned off the announcements for now.

Had the same problem this morning, just did the same and disabled it. Probably something I'll never turn on again anyway haha

When you press and hold the side button to use Siri, there is new haptic feedback when it actually responds to your question, I've also noticed it gives feedback when you swipe out of it

The eloquence voice is crackling as hell in this beta, like it has buffering problems.

Yup, noticed this also. Using the Reed voice.

--Pete

For those with iPhone 17, you have new Siri voices. Hope you like them, sorry people for those of us who have 16 pro max, no.

When you go and play a video in youtube for example and try and navigate around voiceover becomes very choppy and speech sounds like static

when I was having this issue, my phone was indexing. a few minutes ago I noticed the choppyness was gone. I went into settings, and immediately noticed indexing was done. so yeah, if you're having choppyness, and indexing is still in progress, that's probably what's causing it. not sure why it would break eloquence, but there ya have it.

Hi everyone,
Thanks for the update regarding the indexing—that definitely explains the choppiness from earlier!
I do have another quick question regarding VoiceOver audio quality. Recently, I've noticed that the VoiceOver speech audio sounds unusually flat, as if it has completely lost its treble and bass response. It sounds quite tinny/muffled compared to normal.
I was wondering:
* Is anyone else experiencing this loss of treble and bass with VoiceOver on their devices?
* Has anyone found a workaround or specific setting adjustment to fix or restore the audio quality (such as tweaks under Accessibility > VoiceOver > Audio or voice sample rate settings)?
I'd really appreciate any insights or suggestions. Thanks again!

Hello,
Yes, this is a wide-spread issue. It was really bad in Beta 1. It improved a little in Beta 2, but nothing seems to have changed much in betas 3 and 4.
I'm afraid there is no legit workaround, other than to turn up your Speech Volume. Cumbersome, but it's the only solution I could find. And even then, it's still flat.
Let's hope beta 5 does the trick.

They now let us use the very old siri voices like Aaron with VoiceOver.

I hoped this would fix it. It certainly doesn't on a 16 E. has anyone tried a system reset and set the device up as new?

I was running the public beta, but it broke the Zoom Accessibility feature. So I decided to switch to the developer beta, as we are far enough along now that it should be pretty solid, especially given my experience with the recent public beta.

The Zoom bug does seem to be fixed on my iPhone 16 Pro max. Yay!

Overall, VoiceOver has been pretty solid with beta 4. The flat sound is still there from earlier betas, but isn't too bad. I do notice some subtle changes in sound richness when just listening to VO or when listening to a video or music. VoiceOver does sound a little better while playing media, but not as good as in IOS 26.

The double tap shortcut for dictation does largely seem to be fixed, but now I'm having problems sometimes, where waht I say is being written twice. This seems to happen most in the Mail app. I haven't noticed it much, if at all yet in Twitter/X and in messages. It happens all the time in Mail though.

I use the Alex voice, and I don't get the voice fading out like some are saying. While indexing, VO would sometimes chop up a little, but this seemed to go away after a while. I think general performance is actually even a little better than in the earlier public beta.

yeah, there are still some bugs, but I am having a pretty good experience so far, and it's not the buggy mess some would say, at least for me.

There is one feature I'm trying to find desperately though. In IOS 27, apparently there's some new punctuation setting for dictation that seems to want to add a period every time you pause speaking for a microsecond. It's really annoying, and I want to turn it off. I don't want to edit every dictated item to remove several random periods. I found the smart punctuation option, which is off. Tehre's supposed to be an auto-punctuation option under the dictation area of keyboard settings, but it's not there. I even asked Siri, and it told me about the same to settings. Does anyone know how to kill this feature?

Siri is actually quite good as well, and I've been using it more in the past week than I have in years.

Might that feature you are talking about Jesse Anderson
be tied to an iPhone 17 pro or pro max?

Hello Peter,
I don't think the issue you mentioned should actually be considered an iOS 27 problem. I have this same issue on an iPhone 17 Pro running iOS 26.5.2, and it usually requires a restart to resolve. I didn't expect that there would be no improvement in iOS 27.

The feature to remove automatic punctuation such as periods and commas when you pause during dictation is in fact called, "Auto Punctuation".
Both on iOS 18.7.8 (primary device)) and iOS 26.5.2 (backup device),it is found in Settings, General, Keyboard, under the Dictation heading.
There are two toggles, Enable Dictation, and Auto Punctuation.
If it is not showing up in iOS 27, it may be beneficial to use the search function in settings to try and locate it by doing a search for 'Auto Punctuation'.

HTH. 🙂

@By longma on Wednesday, July 22, 2026 - 14:52
Yes, in iOS27 beta 3 I was able to reboot the phone and get rid of this very frustrating issue. However, with this 4th beta, rebooting my phone is not fixing the problem. I guess this isn't a very prevalent problem since I haven't seen anyone else talk about it but you and I. Don't know if it is device specific or something else.

Hopefully this can be resolved in the next beta.

Thanks for confirming anyway.

--Pete

I had the feeling the fading was similar to a system notification sound duck which isn’t related to VO and can’t be turned off as far as I know and I noticed my voice was ducking during times there were likely images inline with the text so I went on the hunt and found the culprit. I think this sound is triggering a system notification duck but either way, turning it off fixes the issue. To do this. Settings > accessibility > voiceover > audio > Voiceover sounds and haptics > Detected Text & Images. Turn this off and the problem goes away.

I updated when beta 3 came out, and when the public beta launched I switched around my settings to be on the public beta track, so I just updated today. My phone is indexing again. Is that normal? I sort of got the impression that a full indexing was a one and done kind of thing. Maybe that's only after the beta cycle?

Yes,

Well in iPad 9, beta public 2 does a better job. I check a picture of a friend she sent me, did said that she was wearing a blue dress. Wish it was like JAWS for windows, where you could ask more questions. The VO issue seen to be no longer a problem. Hope it continues.

I'm still getting the speech fading out and cutting off words. Eloquence also seems more crackly so I've switched back to good ol Samantha compact for now.

The VO sounds being way louder than speech does seem like it might be fixed. Not yet sure if the audio ducking has been fixed.

2 of the 3 VO issues I reported during the last beta say they have a lot of similar reports and that they may have identified a fix, so here's hoping.

I am using Tom. Perhaps apple likes me now? Not. public beta 2 is fast and responsive. Now I can get to messages by using my external keyboard with no issues.

Should I be getting image description on IOS Dev Beta 4 on my iPad mini 6th Generation or is image description, as in the richer descriptions that use off device AI limited only to the devices that can run Apple intelligence?

Also, it is a typical Apple prude. On my iPhone 15 pro, flicking through the gutter that is X, I tried to get a description on an image and was told, 'Image description is not designed for this purpose' or something similar. It turned out it was a woman in underwear and, not that I'm saying I want to have pictures of women in underwear described, but any barier to us not getting the same information as sighted peers is frustrating. It's not for Apple to say what we do and do not look at. I did notice a content warning thing in the image description settings so it might be there is a way to circumnavigate that I've either not engaged or is not yet working in the betas.

AGain... I don't want x rated pictures described, I would just like equity in what we and our sighted peers can observe... I feel I'm protesting too much here...

Smart Picture would had describe it to you and would had told you the color of her panti and if the person had tatoo. Last time I check I was over 18. Like I gave the example before about nothing to do something bad but if she was your wife or girl friend and she was playful with you and sent it to you, you should be able to know.

What's smart picture?

I'm sure there are many circumstances where another layer of filtering could get in the way depending on intent. What if we're looking at kitchen knives, reports on war torn places in this troubled world, guns for those who are interested.

I have brought this up before, but treating blind people like children and refusing to let us know the truth of an image is highly patronising.

And another thing... Here I go... it doesn't gendre anyone, which is crazy. Of course we know it is AI, there can be mistakes, and it is inferred, but a sighted person would be able to, if they so wished, to gendre people. I get that the idea is to not insult, say gendre doesn't matter... Maybe.. .But, to me, it does actually.

'A person' just isn't enough. I would like, 'a middle aged man', or, 'an older woman,' etc. The arguement might be that these are judgement calls unlike hair colour, length... But, I return to the original argument, we should get the same information, or as close to it, as sighted peers, whilst accepting that AI isn't perfect and may well get it a little wrong some times.

If apple is going to dilute this amazing technology with it's own judgement calls and morality, I might not stick around for it. Maybe android will be the way to go. Which will be a shame.

JAWS for Windows. Hope that the new VO feature of describing is like that. Sorry for the confusion.

Nope, no auto punctuation option under Keyboard and Dictation for me. I have the dictation toggle, but that's it in that area. I even did a settings search, and came up with nothing. No idea why that option isn't there? I really want to turn it off too, because it's inserting periods all the time while I'm dictating when I don't want it to.

Quick update since the original post. I just discovered that no auto-punctuation option seems to be an IOS 27 problem. I checked my work iPhone running 26, and the option was there. I also talked with a co-worker who is also running the 27 beta, and no auto-punctuation for him either. The plot thickens... I guess I'll be reporting that in the Feedback app.

@By longma
After several days of rebooting and still not having this work, I finally rebooted again last night and now Voiceover speaks when the phone wakes up after pressing the side button.

I don't know why it took so many times to reboot in order to fix this issue. Perhaps the phone was busy re-indexing on account of the new beta build and that somehow interfered with the process of Voiceover speaking when the phone wakes.

Anyway, seems to work fine now. 🤞

--Pete

When I flick up and down on a photo in the photos app, one of the options is to ask questions about the image. I believe this also allows you to ask follow-up questions.

There is a similar option in the island area in the middle of the top of the display when one flicks down there.

There are also options to explore image. So you don't have to stick with just the automatic description but can get additional information about images if desired. Nice funtionality.

--Pete

Hopefully beta 5 will have this fixed. I would literally cry if I had to deal with this being.. on.. all of the time. It was a terrible idea when it was first implemented, it is a terrible idea now. 🙁👎

Hope also. Maybe apple also does not like you. I know they do not me. I will install beta in august when the beta is in the letter B or A in my 16 pro max.

Hope also. Maybe apple also does not like you. I know they do not me. I will install beta in august when the beta is in the letter B or A in my 16 pro max.

I finally upgraded to a phone I can test these bugs on. Running the public beta on a 16E. And yes, I too have the VoiceOver fading out on words and letters bug. I have my default voice set to Reed. However, VO will randomly switch to Samantha.. She will stay for a while then switch back to Reed. Also, the audio extreme ducking is still there. And, right now safari keeps playing the loading tick, even though the AppleVis page is fully loaded as I write this. Also, a little of topic, what is the playground fore?