14 top iOS 27 tips and tricks you should try

After months of beta testing, iOS 27 is finally available to download around the world – and it brings some massive changes to the iPhone experience.

While Apple has billed this update as mainly focused on under-the-hood changes and efficiency improvements, there are still plenty of new features and quality-of-life tweaks worth trying. 

From a smarter Siri to better photo editing tools and useful Safari updates, here are some of the best iOS 27 tips and tricks to check out.

1. Make Siri speak faster or slower  

The new Siri app is quite a big deal, and just like before, you get a lot of different options for accents and voices. However, there’s now also a preview feature where you can adjust the speed or pace of speech and how expressive it is. 

If you open Settings and find Siri, then scroll down past the languages, you’ll see a toggle switch next to Expressive Voices Preview. Toggle this on, and you’ll be able to choose between two different American voices, then adjust the pace and expressive tones to your preferences.

If you find Siri talks too fast or too slow, or is too excitable, you can play with these settings until you’re happy and tap the tick in the top corner. 

2. AirPods Custom EQ

There are a couple of new AirPods features in iOS 27, but the biggest is that Apple has finally enabled custom EQ for AirPods users. As long as you have one of the newer pairs with the H2 chipset inside, you’re good. 

If you’ve just upgraded to iOS 27, you first need to update the AirPods firmware. To do that, you connect the AirPods to your phone the usual way – by opening the case on your AirPods Pro or taking AirPods Max out of their case. 

Now, the issue is that there’s no way to force the update to install. Your best bet is to leave your AirPods near your phone, connected to a charger, for around 30 minutes.

Once updated, go into the AirPods settings in the Settings app, tap on the ‘Audio and Routing’ option, and you should now have an Equaliser option. Tap this, and you should now see a three-band EQ. You can adjust the bass, middle and treble frequencies to your liking. 

3. Extend your photos

So one new thing in iOS 27 is the ability to extend a photo’s borders. It uses Generative AI in a similar way to how Photoshop can do it – basically looking at your photo – and then extending and filling in the edges to make the photo wider, or changing the aspect ratio. It’s pretty cool and works very well. 

Open a photo in Photos, and tap that little icon that looks like three sliders in the bottom toolbar. You’ll see an option called Tools, with the Apple Intelligence logo on it. If you tap this, you’ll see an option called Extend. If you tap this, it’ll show you a cropping tool that’s blurred heavily towards the edges, and you adjust the frame until it’s the shape, or aspect ratio that you want. 

When you’re happy, tap the yellow ‘Extend’ button and wait for it to do its thing. If you’ve accidentally cropped too far into a photo and want to just extend it and widen the shot, this is how you do it. 

4. Reframe your photos 

So Apple has introduced this really cool feature in iOS 27 where you can reframe your photos as if you took them from a different angle. It combines generative AI with some pretty incredible spatial awareness to pull it off. So if you’d like to edit your photos to make it look like you shot it from a different angle, you can do it without re-shooting. 

To do this, open a photo in your Photos app and tap the sliders in the toolbar to open the editing tools, then tap the Apple Intelligence Tools icon on the next screen. 

You’ll see one called ‘Reframe’. Tap it, and it’ll do a quick scan of the photo to determine perspective; then you can drag the photo around to change the angle and perspective until you’re happy. Tap the yellow ‘Reframe’ button when you’re happy, and that’s it. How cool is that? 

5. Save a video frame as a photo 

In iOS 27, you can save an individual frame from a video as a still photo without having to take a screenshot or any other jiggery pokery. 

Open a video in your Photos app and then press ‘pause’ when it opens and starts playing. Now you can scrub along the video to find the precise frame you want. If you tap the three-dot menu at the top, you’ll find a new menu option there called ‘Save Video Frame as Photo’. Tap that, and you’re done. 

Your video frame is saved and no screenshotting or cropping required. It’s so much easier. 

6. Siri Mode in the Camera

In the new camera app, there’s a dedicated Siri mode where you can snap a photo and it’ll be able to tell you what’s in the picture. Just open the camera app, change to Siri mode in the bottom toolbar, and snap a photo using the Siri button. 

Now wait until it’s detected what’s there, and you’ll get an overview in text in a bubble at the top telling you what it’s found. 

It doesn’t have to end there either. If you tap the conversation icon in the bottom left, you’ll be able to follow up and have a chat with Siri about that product or object in a very natural, conversational way. 

Or if you tap the icon that looks like a picture and a magnifying glass, you’ll get that Apple Visual Intelligence interface where it can find results online where you can buy or research more on the object. 

7. Separate Alarm volume from Ringtone Volume 

So, who knows why this took Apple so long, but you can now set your Alarm to ring at a different volume from your ringtone and alerts. If you’ve ever missed an alarm because it was accidentally set too quietly – this writer definitely has more than once – this is your saviour feature. 

Open your Settings and find the Sounds and Haptics menu. You’ll see an ‘Alarms and Timers’ volume option with a toggle for matching your ringtone volume. Toggle this off so that it no longer matches, and then turn it up as loud as you like it. 

8. Adjust Liquid Glass transparency 

Liquid Glass has been one of the most divisive changes to iOS in years. Some people really hate it, but now, thankfully, you can reduce the transparency of any glass elements in the interface using a slider in the Settings app. 

Open Settings and find Appearance. Now find Liquid Glass, and on the next screen there’s a slider you can drag left or right to make it more or less transparent. Simple. 

Along with the newer, less glassy app icons on the Home Screen, it’s definitely a more pleasant experience and crucially makes different elements in the interface easier to distinguish from each other. 

There’s a new Full Screen widget option you can choose from now, which – you guessed it – expands a widget to fill an entire Home Screen. There are a couple of ways to do it. 

If you already have a widget, like the calendar widget on your screen, tap and hold it; you’ll get a pop-up menu with different size and format options running across the top. The last one (furthest to the right) is your full-screen option. Tap it to expand the widget to fill the screen. 

If you want to add a new full-screen widget, just go to your Home Screen customisation screen by long-pressing on a blank space on your Home Screen and tapping the paintbrush icon in the top left. Choose ‘Add Widget’ in that menu, and now you can go through the widget browser and find the widget you want. You can even choose a Smart Stack, and build a stack of full-screen widgets if you want. 

10. Get notified about web page updates

So let’s say you want to be instantly notified when a web page is updated. It could be you’re waiting for a product drop or concert page to go live, or waiting for an update on a specific story; there’s a new feature in Safari that can do this for you. 

Open a page – like a concert booking page, sneaker drop page or whatever in Safari – and tap the side menu in the Safari URL field. You should see a ‘Notify Me’ option there. 

Describe the change you’re looking for, and then tap the ‘edit’ button to change how frequently you want it to check for updates. You can choose daily at a specific time, or hourly, even weekly or monthly. Set the time, and you’re done. 

You might have to wait a minute or two for it to build the routine. But when it’s done, hit ‘next’. On the next screen you’ll need to allow notifications, and that’s it; Safari will check every hour, day or week and tell you when there’s been an update.

11. Build your own Shortcuts using AI

So Shortcuts used to be a pretty complex app to master, and needed quite a lot of effort and thought to build multi-step options. But with iOS 27 and its built-in AI, you can literally just ask it to build the shortcut you want. 

Open the Shortcuts app and tap the big plus button at the bottom. Now you’ll get a screen asking you what shortcut you’d like. 

You could say something like, “Every morning at 8:30am, show me the day’s weather, show me any events and reminders for the day.” Once done, you can run the Shortcut to see how it presents, or go into the settings to see the nitty-gritty of how it’s been built if you want to fine-tune it. If you need to make any changes, you can again just follow up with another natural language request and tweak until you have it the way you want. 

You can also set shortcuts that open YouTube and disable the portrait lock, then reactivate it when you exit. Or even location-based shortcuts, like disabling Wi-Fi when you leave home or sending a message to your partner or significant other when you leave work with an ETA. 

12. A new way to set timers 

In iOS 27, there’s a new interface for setting timers from Control Centre. If you swipe down from the right to get into Control Centre, and tap the timer icon, you’ll now get a horizontal slider-type interface. 

Swipe left or right to set your timer; you can go from 1 minute all the way up to two hours. Hit ’Start Timer’ when you’re set, and that’s it. You’ve got a cool new interactive timer control in Dynamic Island. 

13. Copy, delete and paste screenshots 

This isn’t an entirely new feature, but there’s a new part to it. So for a while now, when you take a screenshot and hit done, or specifically, hit that ‘tick’ in the top corner, you’ll get the option to copy and delete the screenshot, so you can immediately paste it into a message, and the screenshot doesn’t take up any storage space in your photo reel. 

But now, there’s a new interface for pasting. So when you open an iMessage, WhatsApp message field, or whatever, you’ll now see a preview of the image and the option to paste it into the chat right there above your keyboard. You don’t have to long-press or find the paste option in any menus, making the process a lot cleaner and more intuitive. 

14. Transcribing meetings in the Notes app

So Voice Memos, Apple’s long-time app, is a great tool for quickly recording voice notes and even transcribing them after they’ve been recorded. However, there is a better way if you want to record and see the text transcription immediately as you’re recording: the Apple Notes app. 

I will preface this by saying that the feature itself isn’t new, but the accuracy with which Siri transcribes is much better than before. At least, if you’re in a region where Siri AI is available. 

What you need to do is open Apple Notes, create a new note and then tap the little paperclip icon, and in the pop-up menu you’ll see an option to record audio. Before you start recording, tap the little speech bubble icon in the bottom left, and then hit the red recording button. As you speak, or as it detects speech, it’ll transcribe it, and when you’re finished, you can hit the tick mark in the top right corner, and it’ll attach the voice recording and the text to the note. 

You can then copy and paste the text anywhere you want if you need to format it differently or share it with someone else.