At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 25), Apple announced several updates to its operating systems, services, and apps. Among these were a new name scheme and a design that the business dubbed “Liquid Glass.” The more personalized, AI-powered Siri that Apple unveiled at the conference last year was one much anticipated innovation about which the firm was conspicuously silent.
During the speech, Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, mentioned the Siri upgrade only once, stating, “As we have discussed, we are continuing our work to bring the features that make Siri even more personal.” We look forward to sharing more about this effort in the upcoming year, although it took longer to reach our high-quality bar.
The “coming year” timeline suggests that Apple will not release any updates before to 2026. In the AI era, where new models, updates, and upgrades are released quickly, that represents a major delay.
First announced at WWDC 24, the more personalized Siri is expected to bring artificial intelligence updates to the beleaguered virtual assistant built into iPhone and other Apple devices. At the time, the company hyped it as the “next big step for Apple” and said Siri would be able to understand your “personal context,” like your relationships, communications, routine, and more.
Additionally, by enabling you to take action both within and across your apps, the assistant was supposed to be more helpful.
The more customized Siri was still under development, but according to Bloomberg, it was not always operating as intended. According to the research, Siri only functioned as intended two-thirds of the time due to quality difficulties, which made it impractical to ship.
In March, Apple formally said that it was delaying the launch because the Siri update would take longer to provide than expected. Additionally, the organization removed John Giannandrea, SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, from the Siri project and replaced him with Mike Rockwell, who had previously worked on the Vision Pro.
After faltering on a big release, the corporation was attempting to get back on track, as seen by the shake-up. Investors were alarmed by the suggestion that Apple’s AI technology lagged behind that of competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Apple and OpenAI collaborated to help bridge the gap in the interim; customers might be redirected to ChatGPT when they asked Siri queries that the assistant was unable to respond to. Apple has updated Image Playground, its AI image generating app, to incorporate ChatGPT as part of the future iOS 26 version.
At this year’s WWDC, the company continued to make other AI promises, including developer access to the on-device foundation models, live translation, upgrades to Genmoji (in addition to aforementioned Image Playground), Visual Intelligence improvements, an AI “Workout Buddy” for Apple Watch, AI in Xcode, and the introduction of an updated, AI-powered version of its Shortcuts app for scripting and automation.
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