AI-infused Siri likely arriving alongside iOS 19.4 in Spring 2026, not this fall
The revamped Siri assistant with more advanced artifical intelligence (AI) features should launch with the iOS 19.4 update, not iOS 19.0, and Apple is already testing it.
MacRumors has spotted iOS 19.4 in its visitor logs although iOS 19.0 won’t arrive until September. This could only mean one thing: Apple’s engineers are already devekloping and testing iOS 19.4 even though the company hasn’t even previewed iOS 19.0 yet. And if history is an indication, iOS 19.4 should drop in Spring 2026.
Apple doesn’t normally kick off development work on these small updates so far ahead. But given the Siri situation, it’s perfectly reasonable to speculate that the long promised (but delayed) AI features for the voice assistant are the sole reason why some teams within Apple are now tasked with developing iOS 19.4.
AI Siri could arrive alongside iOS 19.4 in Spring 2026
Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors:
iOS 19.4 is expected to be released in March or April next year, so the software update is still nearly a year away. However, Apple develops both “Fall” and “Spring” versions of iOS each year, with our website’s analytics logs indicating that both iOS 19.0 and iOS 19.4 are in active development within the company.
In March, Apple said the more personalized Siri with new AI features—personal context, onscreen awareness and deeper integration with in-app actions—would be arriving in the coming year, without being more specific about the timeline.
“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,” the company said. “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.”
The New York Times claims the delayed Siri update is still on track for launch in iOS 19.0 this fall. But some well-informed journalists, like Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, speculate that an AI version of Siri may not be ready until iOS 20 in Fall 2026.
At any rate, Apple is going to preview iOS 19.0 at its upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this June. The company will then release the first iOS 19.0 beta after a June 9 keynote. Subsequent betas will follow over the summer, and registered developers and public beta testers will be able to install them on their devices for testing. iOS 19.0 will be commercially released for all compatible devices sometime in September, ahead of the new iPhone 17 lineup.
Apple’s development process for iOS releases
Apple tweaked its development processes in response to the buggy iOS 13 release. As a result, the company now coordinates multiple teams to work on both major and minor updates (so-called “dot” releases) in parallel.
Key to this is Livability, an internal tool engineers use to manage features that are in development within pre-release versions of iOS, turn specific features on or off across intended release timelines based on their completion status, and more.
Before, Apple’s engineers would integrate all of the in-development features into daily builds, which contributed to instability and slowed development times.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/05/01/ai-siri-ios-19-spring-2026-speculation/
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