The release date for the AI-enhanced version of the Siri voice assistant will likely come in spring 2026, according to information leaking out of Apple. That’s nine months from now, and a year after it was first expected.
The long delay in the launch of smarter Siri was a significant black eye for Apple, clearly demonstrating that it wasn’t keeping up with rivals in AI research.
Smarter Siri with more AI release date: Spring 2026
Apple promised “the start of a new era for Siri” at WWDC in June 2024, thanks to a hefty infusion of artificial intelligence. The company laid out a glowing future for the voice assistant, and said the new version of Siri would come as part of an update to iOS 18.
But in March 2025, the company changed the rollout to sometime “in the coming year.” That gave the company another 12 months to finish. And it seems it’ll need that entire time.
“Apple Inc. has set an internal release target of spring 2026 for its delayed upgrade of Siri,” Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources at the company.
It’ll supposedly be part of iOS 26.4, which will launch in March of next year, if Apple follows its usual schedule of OS updates. The company might be ready to demo smarter Siri when the iPhone 17 series launches in the autumn. But it’s being cautious after heavily hyping it last year then being unable to deliver.
Officially, the company is much more vague about timing for this important AI-related release. During the WWDC25 keynote on Monday, Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of software engineering, said, “We’re continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal. This work needed more time to reach our high-quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.”
Apple explained the delay
Federighi gave multiple interviews this week explaining why Apple announced the AI-enhanced version of Siri at WWDC24 then couldn’t hit that release date.
According to the Apple executive, the company was overly optimistic about what could be accomplished with the first version of its artificial intelligence architecture. They had an early version of it functioning last June and believed they could improve it to the point it was ready for customers in a few months. But developers eventually realized they’d have to move to version two because the first one would never be good enough. And getting it ready apparently will take a year.
What to expect from an AI-enhanced Siri
The smarter Siri, as shown in a video at WWDC last year, will be capable of doing almost anything an iPhone user can do. The current version of Siri can “Turn on the kitchen light” when ordered to. The future Siri is up to handling “Send the photos from the cookout on Saturday to Malia.”
Apple’s AI efforts are focused on typical users. An average iPhone user doesn’t need AI to generate a heist movie starring puppets, as some rivals can do, and so that’s not going to be a part of Siri. Instead, the voice-driven system will be better at understanding what users want and performing complex everyday tasks. Apple calls it, “AI for the rest of us.”
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
