Apple’s Friday news drop confirms AI-infused Siri has been delayed until 2026
Apple has officially confirmed in a statement that a smarter version of its Siri assistant infused with Apple Intelligence has been delayed until 2026.
Mark Gurman was the first to report on Bloomberg that the Siri overhaul promised as part of Apple Intelligence’s preview demonstrated at the WWDC in June 2024 has been postponed. Four days after his story, the iPhone maker told the press that the expected Apple Intelligence Siri features will be rolled out “in the coming year.”
Apple didn’t give a more precise timeline or a reason for the delay. The company previously said the promised features would come in 2025. Apple’s statement is an admission that it cannot catch up to other players in the AI race.
The Apple Intelligence Siri overhaul has been delayed
Apple conveniently delivered this news on a Friday to give investors time to digest it and react accordingly instead of impulsively. Here’s a verbatim statement Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy issued to Reuters and other media outlets:
Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.
“In the coming year” could mean this summer, this fall, next summer, next fall or anywhere in between. Realistically, it will probably be the fall of 2026. Apple might preview an AI version of Siri at the WWDC in June 2026 and release it for public consumption alongside iOS 20 in September 2026.
Gurman allegedly learned from Apple engineers on the Siri team that no one at Apple expects an improved Siri to arrive with iOS 19.4 in Spring 2026. Engineers reportedly don’t even expect a more conventional Siri upgrade to be previewed at this year’s upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, either. The upgrade was supposed to empower Siri with more capable large language models.
What Siri features have been delayed?
The following Siri enhancements that were expected to arrive as part of the iOS 18.5 update in May likely won’t be ready until next year: Onscreen awareness, personal context understanding and in-app controls.
Personal context will enable Siri to analyze your emails, photos, messages and other data to carry out tasks and respond to queries like “Find the email where Eric mentioned ice skating” or “What’s my passport number?”
Onscreen awareness will permit Siri to see what you do in apps, so you could ask it to send a photo you’re currently viewing to someone.
With in-app controls, Siri will be able to duck in and out of apps to chain together a series of tasks to fulfill complex requests, like editing an image and sharing it, moving files between apps and more. Examples include asking Siri to find a podcast a friend recommended in a chat or pulling up flight tracking information from a relative (the “When’s Mom’s flight arriving?” feature).
Siri’s overhaul so far has included a new glow animation, a redesigned Type to Siri interface with a new way to invoke the feature (double-tap the Home indicator), improved natural language understanding, and ChatGPT integration that offloads requests that cannot be resolved on-device to OpenAI’s AI models in the cloud.
Apple is a laggard in the AI race
My fear is that Apple will fall further behind OpenAI and companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, whose Alexa+ assistant can continue conversations across devices, as opposed to Siri which remains limited chats on the same device.
Twelve months is a long time in technology, especially in AI. Just a year ago, AI image and video generators were okay but nothing to write home about. Today, they’re very capable. Imagine where the AI industry will be a year and a half from today when the promised Siri features finally find their way onto people’s devices when iOS 20 is released in September 2026.
Remarkably, Apple seems unable to put its act together regarding AI development. Back in 2018, the Cupertino company poached Google’s search and AI tzar John Giannandrea to be its senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. He’s now been almost seven years with Apple and Siri still sucks. Maybe it’s time for Tim Cook to make additional changes to Apple’s leadership team.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/03/07/apple-intelligence-siri-delay-confirmed/
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