Why We Won’t Get an AI-Powered Siri Anytime Soon
If you suspected that Siri would soon be equipped with artificial intelligence, you weren’t alone. In fact, Apple has been touting it heavily since the last WWDC, showing off its ChatGPT-like assistant in commercials and promotional materials.
Almost a year has passed since WWDC 2024, and the new Siri is still not here. The thing is, it probably won’t be here for a long time. How long that will be, no one knows ( I’ve been tracking delays here ), but one thing seems likely: Apple probably won’t show off the AI Siri at next week’s WWDC 2025 .
Apple’s AI Program Is a Total Mess
In a report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman last month, he describes the chaotic situation surrounding Apple’s AI department. The article is a fascinating and in-depth look at Apple’s AI problems, and I won’t give a detailed summary of the entire article. However, I will briefly discuss what’s going on and how it relates to Siri’s AI.
Apple executives, including senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi, didn’t believe AI was worth the investment and weren’t willing to dedicate resources from Apple’s core software components to developing the technology. But once Federighi used ChatGPT after its launch in late 2022, he did a 180. He and other Apple executives began meeting with major AI companies to learn everything they could, and pushed for iOS 18 to have “as many AI-powered features as possible.”
While Apple already had an AI department before this fuss (the company poached Google’s head of AI, John Giannandrea), the engineers simply couldn’t match the quality and accuracy of the tools provided by other companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, which had a huge advantage in generative AI.
This lag manifested itself in two ways: First, many of the AI features Apple brought to market were immature. For example, Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries feature famously made several serious mistakes, such as “summarizing” a BBC news alert that said United Healthcare shooting suspect Luigi Mangione had shot himself. ( Apple later disabled the feature for news alerts .)
Second, since Apple couldn’t rely on its own technology to implement Apple Intelligence, they outsourced some of the technology to another AI company. While there was much debate about which company they should work with (Giannandra wanted to work with Google and bring Gemini to iOS), Apple ultimately settled on ChatGPT — which is why OpenAI’s bot is built into your iPhone today .
Apple’s lack of focus on AI meant they missed out on acquiring GPUs, the core processor used to train and run AI models. They also have strict privacy policies around user data, which severely limits what data they can use to train their models. (Some might say this is actually a good thing , and wonder about the companies that actually have a ton of data to train on.)
Siri
While Apple managed to get some AI features working “well enough” to launch, Siri was never one of them. To implement AI into Siri, the company had to split Siri’s “brain” into two parts: one with the existing code used for traditional Siri tasks like setting timers and making calls, and one for the AI. While the AI side can work in a vacuum, integrating it with the other half of Siri’s brain is problematic and is responsible for much of the lag.
But rather than wait for Apple to figure out how to make Siri’s AI work to actually show off its new features, the company went ahead and pushed them hard. During WWDC 2024, we saw pre-recorded demos of Siri taking complex queries and generating helpful responses by tapping into both its knowledge of the user in question and its awareness of what’s happening onscreen. A prime example was an Apple employee asking Siri about his mom’s travel itinerary: Siri looked at the employee’s messages with his mom to come up with a plan.
Apple even hired The Last of Us ’ Bella Ramsey to promote Siri’s AI features: In the ad, Ramsey sees someone at a party he recognizes but can’t remember their name. Ramsey then asks Siri, “What’s the name of the guy I met a couple months ago at Cafe Granel?” Siri immediately responds with the acquaintance’s name, pulling it from a calendar entry. Ramsey doesn’t have to provide an exact date or where to get the information, since Siri’s AI is apparently aware of context and can understand vague answers. (Apple has since removed the ad from its YouTube account.)
Since then, AI features have been gradually rolling out in various iOS 18 updates, but not Siri AI. We’ve been following reports (mostly from Gurman) that Apple engineers were having trouble getting it up and running, with each delay pushing back Siri AI to the next major iOS 18 update. At one point, we thought it might arrive in iOS 18.4: As Gurman reports in this latest article, that was the plan, but Federighi himself was surprised to see that Siri AI features weren’t working in the beta for 18.4.
We Probably Won’t Get a Siri Update at WWDC
Siri’s big AI update has been delayed again, this time “indefinitely.” There are no plans to announce new Siri features with iOS 19 (or iOS 26 , if rumors are to be believed) at WWDC next week , according to Guriman’s sources. While the goal is to release Siri AI for iOS 26 at some point, the situation is dire — Siri features are reportedly broken a third of the time, and every time you fix one major Siri bug, “three more pop up.”
Gurman’s sources say Apple has an AI division in Zurich working on a new Siri based on LLM that ditched the current assistant’s two-way brain. Siri also has a new boss, Mike Rockwell, who replaced Giannandrea this spring. Some sources even say Apple’s internal chatbot is now competing with ChatGPT, which could prove useful if integrated with Siri.
There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about Siri’s long-term future, but there’s no denying that the last year has been a disaster. If you’re excited about Siri’s next big thing, dial down your expectations in the short term.