iOS 27 puts a much better dictation experience on your iPhone, and you must enable it

A better dictation system is already on your iPhone. Apple just didn't switch it on.

By Shikhar Mehrotra Published June 20, 2026 1:40 PM

Electronics, Phone, Mobile Phone — Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

If you have an iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, or iPhone Air running iOS 27 beta, you have a meaningfully better dictation system on your device right now.

However, Apple did not turn it on by default, and most users have no idea it is there.

So what exactly is Advanced Dictation Preview?

iOS 27 ships with two separate dictation systems.

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The one you get depends on your hardware. Even though every iPhone gets some improvements (compared to the standard edition), owners of the iPhone 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air have access to something different. It’s called Advanced Dictation Preview.

The advanced version runs on Apple’s AFM Core Advanced model, the same one powering the new expressive Siri voices, and works entirely on-device (without an active internet connection).

In fact, it handles punctuation and capitalization automatically as you speak, so you no longer have to speak the “comma” or “period” out loud.

Why doesn’t every iPhone get it?

The Advanced Dictation feature delivers a major boost in accuracy. The catch, however, is that it is switched off by default. That’s because the feature is still in beta, and Apple is gathering opt-in feedback to fine-tune it.

For now, if you have access to iOS 27 beta and you use voice dictation frequently, you can go to Settings > General > Keyboards, and scroll down to find Advanced Dictation Preview (via Tech Between the Lines).

The reason why every iPhone getting iOS 27 doesn’t get the feature is RAM. AFM Core Advanced needs at least 12GB of RAM to run locally, and the standard iPhone 17 ships with 8GB of RAM. Even the iPhone 16 Pro, despite being a recent device, also has 8GB of RAM, which is why it is excluded.

Moreover, this is a fixed hardware cutoff and not a staged rollout. If your iPhone makes the cut, head to Settings and flip the toggle to get an improved dictation experience.

Shikhar Mehrotra

News Writer

For more than five years, Shikhar has consistently simplified developments in the field of consumer tech and presented them…

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