Apple confirmed Friday that the smarter Siri promised at WWDC24 isn’t coming together as quickly as anticipated. After touting the minor Siri upgrades that already rolled out, a company statement ended on a depressing note.
“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,” said Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy. “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.”
This confirms multiple previous rumors indicating that users pining for a smarter Siri shouldn’t hold their breath.
It’s official: Smarter Siri is delayed
Apple introduced Siri with the iPhone 4s in 2011. At the time, interacting with the AI voice assistant to perform simple tasks seemed like sci-fi. Since then, Siri seems to have gotten dumber.
This feeling could stem from multiple things. Maybe Apple’s AI is actually “thinking” too hard. Perhaps users, now comfortable using voice assistants, issue increasingly complicated demands. Or maybe there’s a fundamental flaw in how Siri works. No matter the cause, with the rise of extremely conversational AI chatbots like Alexa and ChatGPT, nobody thinks Siri is winning.
Apple knows it needs to make Siri smarter, too. The company touted the AI assistant as a cornerstone of Apple Intelligence during the WWDC24 keynote.
“Thanks to the capabilities of Apple Intelligence, this year marks the start of a new era for Siri,” said Kelsey Peterson, Apple’s director of machine learning and Al, at the time. Apple added a shiny new Siri UI, deep knowledge of Apple products, a ChatGPT integration and the ability to text Siri questions in iOS 18.1. (Read our how-to on the subject: How to use the (somewhat) new and improved Siri for details.)
Since then, rumor after rumor indicated the major Siri upgrade — with personalized context and the ability to interact with iPhone apps — wouldn’t come to fruition as soon as originally thought. First we thought it would arrive in iOS 18.4. Then iOS 18.5 became the supposed target.
Eventually, the extra-smart smarter Siri — with conversational skills in line with what ChatGPT currently pulls off, powered by a large language model — apparently slipped to 2027!
Reporting Friday on Apple’s Siri delay, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman wrote, “Apple engineers have been racing to fix a rash of bugs in the project. The work has been unsuccessful, according to people involved in the efforts, and they now believe the features won’t be released until next year at the earliest.”
The failure to get the AI Siri out on time not only impacts current device users and the company’s dwindling reputation in AI, but hurts its ability to launch an entirely new hardware product: its smart home hub. Welcome to Apple’s AI crisis. https://t.co/xe98WMVnDv
— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) March 7, 2025
Apple scrambles to fix Siri (and confirms the delay)
In January, Apple tapped veteran executive Kim Vorrath to set things straight. That served as a strong signal that Apple knows it needs to turbocharge its AI efforts. But apparently, improving Siri is tougher than anybody thought.
Friday’s confirmation of the delay for the smarter Siri — which comes direct from Apple to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, not an anonymous source rumor in the rumor mill — serves as an admission that the company’s AI gurus need more time.
“This is a Friday sort of wah-waaah sad-trombone news drop, but it’s good that Apple is getting on top of it, and setting expectations accurately,” Gruber wrote.
Behind the scenes, Apple execs — including Craig Federighi, the company’s senior vice president of software engineering — recently “voiced strong concerns internally that the features didn’t work properly — or as advertised — in their personal testing,” Gurman reported.
By way of comparison, Alexa+ — the next-gen version of Amazon’s AI assistant, which already works better than Siri in many situations — should roll out in the next few weeks.
Lewis Wallace is the managing editor of Cult of Mac and author of our weekly newsletter, The Weekender.
He’s a San Francisco-based writer and editor specializing in technology and culture. He loves his iPhone, hates Siri, and appreciates any hardware that combines form and function.
Prior to Cult of Mac, he juggled words and ideas as culture editor at Wired.com, homepage editor at TechTV, news product manager at NBCi, copy editor at PC World, reporter at The (Hayward) Daily Review and editor in chief of EveryBody’s News in Cincinnati.
He earned a bachelor of general studies degree with a journalism certificate from the University of Cincinnati. While in school, he worked as the entertainment editor of The News Record and as editor in chief of Clifton Magazine.
He’s also a bass player, who’s recorded and performed around the United States with Those Darn Accordions, The Electric Boogie Dawgz and The Mad Maggies. When not writing, editing or laying down bass lines, he plays darts and serves on the board of the San Francisco Darts League.
