I hate AI, but even I can’t wait to try these 10 features on my iPhone

Apple's WWDC26 keynote unveiled iOS 27 with AI-powered features including automatic password updates, Call Context for surfacing relevant info during calls, customizable Siri voice, and a new Ask to Browse parental control. The update also includes independent alarm volume controls and over 250 other improvements, aiming to make AI practical and user-friendly.

As expected, Apple’s WWDC26 keynote presentation was heavily AI-themed. For those of us growing increasingly sick of the AI hype train https://www.macworld.com/article/3152745/i-hate-ai-speak-to-me-apple.html this was a trying experience, with tech’s buzzword du jour crammed into every conceivable aspect of the OS updates. But it wasn’t all bad. In fact, there are several new functions coming to the iPhone this year which I’m genuinely excited about, showing that AI can be a force for good when companies focus on the output, not on the technology used to get there. Here are 10 iOS 27 features I can’t wait to try. Password maintenance is as boring and laborious as it is necessary. Companies have got a lot better at notifying users when an account password has been compromised in a data breach, but when this happens it tends to happen en masse. Updating and keeping track of dozens of separate passwords is a task so daunting that I tend to put it off, thereby putting my data at risk. But in iOS 27, this will be done for you… by AI, inevitably. The Passwords app will alert you when it becomes aware of vulnerable login details not just compromised passwords but those which are duplicates or otherwise weak and then, crucially, offer to update them for you. Secure and convenient, as my colleague Alex Blake explains https://www.macworld.com/article/3160935/apple-finally-got-rid-of-my-biggest-password-headache.html . Apple It can be a real pain when dealing with a company or call center, trying to wrangle relevant information stored on the same phone you’re currently using to speak to them. They’ll ask for your account ID or ticket number, and you’ll have to rummage through various apps to track this down while awkwardly keeping the conversation going. iOS 27 promises to make this experience easier thanks to a new feature called Call Context. It uses AI to predict information you’ll need based on who you’re talking to. So if you call an airline, it will surface the relevant flight confirmation from Mail, for example. In the past, Apple has given us some choice about the way Siri sounds, but nothing like this. In iOS 27, assuming you have a sufficiently powerful iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, or later, users can customise Siri’s voice using two independent sliders: one adjusts speed, the other expressiveness. And it’s impressive how human it can be made to sound. This isn’t just a cosmetic change. Siri’s droning, pompous voice is a major source of annoyance when delivering error messages, so a more human and less irritating level of expressivity can only improve the user experience. That might be worth upgrading to an iPhone 18 Pro in the fall. iOS already has decent parental controls, but these can be quite clumsy to administer. I use a whitelist and block all other websites by default, so anytime my kids need to browse a new site for homework, I have to go into their settings and add it to the list manually. The new Ask to Browse feature allows them to request permission remotely in the same way they can request 15 more minutes on an app; parents can check out the site, then approve if they feel it’s appropriate. Sometimes you need a loud alarm but don’t want the other system sounds to be quite so attention-grabbing. Fortunately, in iOS 27, the volume of your alarms can be adjusted independently. In the Sounds & Haptics section of Settings, you’ll find toggles that let you detach the volume of alarms, timers, and so on from the general ringtone volume, and then adjust their volume to suit. OK, maybe this isn’t actual AI, but I don’t care. It’s overdue. Not all of the changes in iOS 27 were fully explored in the presentation. This obnoxious slide https://www.macworld.com/article/3159978/marvel-at-over-250-fixes-and-improvements-coming-in-the-apple-updates-this-fall.html lists 263 otherwise unmentioned small improvements across Apple’s ecosystem, and several stand out. The one that I’m most pleased to see number 110 is “Failed messages automatically retry sending.” Small changes are sometimes the most important. Apple Number 113 on that list is another interesting one: “Expire your Shared Albums.” This means you’ll be able to create a shared photo album with a group of friends, but set an expiration time so it doesn’t last forever. Useful when you create an album for a specific event or holiday but don’t want it clogging up your Photos collections afterwards. Safari is getting some nice changes this year. Apple focused on how this will affect Mac users, but Safari on iPhone also gets two valuable updates. The first is a new AI-powered tab organization tool that will group tabs by topic rather than website/domain. This will make it much easier to keep track of all the stuff we’ve been browsing. If you don’t like the sound of that, don’t worry: it’s optional. Automated tab wrangling is useful, but Safari’s new Notify Me feature is a game-changer. It lets you build custom alerts for specific changes to specific websites: when a price drops, for example, or tickets go on sale, you’ll receive a notification. No longer will you have to spend all day refreshing the website and going mad. Again, this feature has mostly been aimed at Mac fans https://www.macworld.com/article/3159801/my-fingers-already-love-this-macos-27-safari-feature.html , but it’s coming to iPhone too. If you own security cameras that are compatible with HomeKit, iOS 27 will be a godsend. Apple Intelligence will make the Home app’s camera management far more sophisticated because it can analyse the imagery and ‘understand’ what it’s seeing. Related notifications will be grouped together; noteworthy clips will be highlighted; and the app will be able to generate descriptions of the video captured by your cameras. All of this will make your security setup much more useful. Apple