Apple’s Ambitious Plans to Create an AI-Powered Siri Have Been Delayed Again.
If you’re an Apple fan and follow tech news closely, you’ve probably been waiting for a major AI-powered Siri update for some time—especially since the company first announced it at WWDC 2024. But despite numerous delays, rumors strongly suggest the next generation of Siri is set to launch with iOS 26.4. And considering Apple just released iOS 26.3 this week , AI-powered Siri is closer than ever, right? Wrong.
As Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports , Apple has once again delayed major Siri updates. According to Gurman, the company had indeed planned to release AI-powered Siri with iOS 26.4, which is reportedly scheduled for March. However, due to testing issues, the company plans to split major Siri updates across multiple iOS updates. Gurman notes that this likely means iOS 26.5, which could be released in May, and iOS 27, which will likely be released in September if Apple follows its usual release schedule. However, given Apple’s track record with this issue, it’s not worth holding your breath.
Implementing new Siri AI features is challenging.
According to Gurman’s sources, Apple is having trouble getting Siri to “process requests correctly” or respond quickly enough, which would defeat the purpose of using the intelligent assistant. Apple is reportedly pushing engineers to use iOS 26.5 to test these features, particularly Siri’s ability to use your personal data to answer questions. Users can enable the corresponding option in Settings to “preview” these features and treat them as a beta.
Engineers are also having trouble configuring Siri’s app intent functionality, which allows Siri to perform actions on your behalf. You can ask Siri to open an image, edit it, and then share it with a friend, but only if the intent actually works. This feature may arrive in iOS 26.5, but it’s unclear due to reliability issues. Siri also interrupts user requests too early and sometimes uses ChatGPT instead of Apple’s core technology, which would be a bad sign for the company.
Apple is also testing new AI features for iOS 26.5 that we haven’t heard about yet. One is a new web search tool that works similarly to other AI-powered search features from companies like Perplexity and Google . You ask a web search question, and it returns a report with short descriptions and links. Another new feature is a custom image creation tool based on Image Playground , but it too is facing development challenges.
Looking even further into the future, Apple plans to further enhance Siri—specifically, adding features similar to ChatGPT to the chatbot assistant . (Reportedly, Gemini will be used to implement these features.) This version of Siri may even get its own app.
What’s happening with Siri’s artificial intelligence?
It seems Siri has truly become a liability for Apple. Despite arguably popularizing intelligent assistants among the general public, Siri quickly fell behind competitors like Alexa and Gemini (formerly Google Assistant). Now, the latter have fully embraced modern generative AI, offering features like contextual awareness and natural language commands. While Amazon and Google users can ask their assistants increasingly complex questions, Siri still seems primarily designed for setting alarms and checking the weather.
With the release of iOS 18 and the advancement of Apple Intelligence in general, this was set to change. Apple initially positioned Siri as a voice assistant capable of seeing the contents of your phone to better understand your questions and perform actions on your behalf—that is, to set app intents. You could ask Siri to edit an image open in the Photos app, and because the assistant has contextual information, it would understand the image and apply the requested changes. Or you could ask when a friend was arriving, and the assistant would scan your messages and emails to find out, first, that your friend was coming to town this weekend, and second, that they had sent you their itinerary, which showed they would arrive at the airport at 3:55 PM.
However, this version of Siri never launched. While the company released iterative updates to Siri with some AI-powered features, reworking it with these ambitious features became a real challenge for Apple’s AI team . This stems from Apple’s overall AI problems: the company was caught off guard by the generative AI wave that began in late 2022 with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and after some resistance from corporate management, it has since struggled to keep up. Apple Intelligence launched with a crude AI and its own problems , but instead of launching a crude AI-powered Siri, the company is struggling to build the assistant internally.
Part of the problem is privacy: unlike other tech companies, which readily collect user data to train their models, Apple remains committed to maintaining privacy when implementing AI features. This complicates matters, as they need to ensure that both hardware and software meet these standards. Allowing Siri to upload user data to the cloud without strict security measures is unacceptable if the privacy of users’ data is to be guaranteed. The company is also focused on building its own hardware for cloud-based AI processing, rather than simply acquiring GPUs, as many other companies do.
Apple is the second-most valuable tech company in the world, but a multitude of factors, including software, hardware, and leadership, mean that even Apple can’t magically create an AI assistant. Although, I’m not sure an AI Siri would boost Apple’s sales at all. I can’t imagine Gemini luring people to Android, and ChatGPT is downloadable on any device. It’s even built into your iPhone.