Apple’s next iPhone software has a multitude of new features that will go on general release in September. The first developer beta, which is available now to all (read this to see if you should download it and how to do so). However, the software has one key feature, AI Dictation, turned off by default. Here’s why and what to do about it.
Which iPhones Can Access AI Dictation
The requirements for the advanced feature mean even the regular iPhone 17 is omitted.
First of all, AI Dictation is one of the elements of iOS 27 that is restricted to a small group of devices. If you have the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max or iPhone Air, then your device is capable. But even the iPhone 17 is not, because it only has 8GB of RAM on board, not the 12GB required for the feature.
It’s also available on the second version of Apple Vision Pro with M5 chip, iPads with M4 or M5 chip and Macs with the M3 chip or later (though these also need at least 12GB of RAM).
The reason for these restrictions is the power required for the more advanced dictation.
“The feature runs on Apple’s new AFM 3 Core Advanced model, which is a 20-billion-parameter, natively multimodal system that uses a sparse architecture, activating just one to four billion parameters at a time depending on the request,” MacRumors reported.
Why The Memory Size Is Crucial
There’s also another feature which relies on this advanced model.
There’s more. It’s a very big model so it needs to be stored in flash memory rather than DRAM, which accounts for the small number of models that can run it.
The same model also provides the customizable new expressive Siri voices, so these are restricted to the same devices. That feature is turned on in the developer beta.
Will this continue? Is Apple planning to leave AI Dictation defaulted to off or will the situation change as more beta versions appear? It’s hard to know at this stage as we’re still on the first developer beta release and the second version isn’t expected just yet. And, of course, you can turn it on manually.
