After facing delays and suggestions that an improved Siri would arrive with iOS 18.5 later this spring, it appears we may not see Siri 2.0 until later this year, possibly not until 2026.
The tech blog Daring Fireball received a statement from Apple today implying that we wouldn't see the next Siri until the release of iOS 19.
"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," Apple spokesperson Jaqueline Roy reportedly told Daring Fireball.
Roy noted in her statement that the company had made Siri "more conversational" while adding features like type to Siri, ChatGPT integration and product knowledge.
No real surprise
It's not an entirely surprising delay for the Apple voice assistant.
In February, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman wrote a massive report that Siri was in trouble with Apple engineers struggling with getting the revamped assistant off the ground.
It was another knock against Apple's AI strategy that was at least two years behind on AI compared to competitors like Google and OpenAI.
For Apple the news got worse this month when it was revealed in another article that Apple may be half a decade behind its rivals.
What announced features is Siri missing?
As Roy noted in her statement, Apple is supposed to be launching a more "personalized Siri" that understands context via AI tools.
Apple announced some of those contextual features during last summer's WWDC some of which have sort of arrived, two of which are the big missing puzzle pieces:
- New visual animations and a light bar animation redesign (arrived in iOS 18.1)
- Conversational context (or natural language responses) (arrived in iOS 18.1)
- Typing to Siri (arrived in iOS 18.1)
- Personal context
- On-screen awareness
- In-app actions across a ton of mostly Apple apps
Personal context means that Siri would be more like an actual assistant to iPhone owners. Potentially it would understand context from texts, emails, or location tracking and respond with related information based on conversational prompts via the "App Intents" tools Siri would run on.
As Apple claimed in its announcement in June of last year: "Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to the user and their on-device information."
This would allow for "Shortcuts" that allow Siri to access content from various Apple apps and utilize other apps in an intelligent manner. For example, you would ask Siri to pull directions from a Note that gets put into Apple Maps and then sent to your Messages app.
Coupled with on-screen awareness, which is supposed to let Siri understand what you're looking at on your screen, it presents an expansive AI-powered future, that clearly isn't ready for the limelight.
For now, though, Siri is hindered and coupled to ChatGPT to do some of the AI requests that Apple promised, though none of the real contextual work.
Outlook
Apple has long had the public ethos that the company would not release a product until it was ready.
In general this has held true, with Apple tending to launch finished, polished products that people want on arrival, save for the super expensive Apple Vision Pro.
Much of the speculation surrounding Apple's first foray into foldable phones has centered on rumors that Apple has been quite picky about the parts going into their folding iPhone and willing to delay launch until it gets things like a creaseless display correct. Though recent rumors have hinted at a distressingly expensive product that may not launch until 2026 or 2027.
That all to say, it's been surprising to see Apple slowly rollout its new Apple Intelligence features with each new iOS 18 update. The company's take on AI didn't even launch with the iPhone 16 lineup, instead some features got turned on with the arrival if iOS 18.1 in late October of 2024.
It seems Apple wasn't ready to join the AI rat race and needed more time tinkering in the kitchen. Though, perhaps it might be better to wait since consumers are regularly reported as being turned off by the recent AI push.
Still, as Apple appears to struggle with AI, it may be some time before we actually get the future Apple pitched at WWDC last year. Which makes us wonder how the company will spin things later this summer during the 2025 iteration of WWDC.
For now, Siri isn't ready for the spotlight and may not be well after people forget there was supposed to be more.
