I cook, I bake bread, I do plenty of stuff in the kitchen. And when I do, I like to use my Apple Watch as a cooking timer. It’s convenient in that it’s on my wrist, taps me when it’s done, and I don’t have to shout out across the room to stop a timer.

But for years now, I’ve had one annoying problem that is so simple, and yet Apple refused to solve it: Siri just doesn’t want to add time to a running timer.

Here’s the situation: I set a timer for 15 minutes. After 10 minutes or so, I look in the oven and can plainly tell that my rolls will need a little longer. “Siri, add two minutes to the timer” simply would not work. Every time I would say that, Siri would respond with, “What do you want to set the timer to?” Siri would happily change the time on my timer, but that requires me to look and see how much time is left, add it up in my head to give it some new time.

Up through the latest iOS 26 release, Siri would behave this way on every platform, every time. On iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, HomePod… this isn’t a “sometimes it works” thing, it just didn’t understand adding time to a running timer.

With the new Siri in the iOS 27 beta, that’s fixed. I tell Siri to add time to a timer, and it just does it! If there are 4 minutes and 42 seconds left, and I say “Add two minutes to the timer,” it just becomes 6 minutes and 42 seconds and keeps on running. But that’s on iPhone… watchOS 27 still ran the old Siri, with the old behavior.

Until watchOS 27 beta 3, released this week. It adds the new Siri and Siri app, and I’m happy to say, my dumb little timer problem is fully resolved.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. The timer screen has a weird formatting problem (see above). And Siri is unusually slow on my watch (and, oddly enough, much faster on iPhone in beta 3 than it was in the first two beta releases). But it’s a beta, and there’s plenty of time to get better.

And now I can simply add time to a timer on my wrist, so I can bake in peace again. Finally.