Apple’s Big AI Siri Plans Are Once Again Delayed

If you’re an Apple fan who closely follows tech news, you may have been looking forward to Siri’s big AI overhaul for a while now, especially since the company initially announced it at WWDC 2024. But despite delay after delay, rumors have strongly suggested that the next generation of Siri is expected to launch with iOS 26.4. And with Apple just releasing iOS 26.3 this week, AI Siri is closer than ever, right? Fake.

As Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported, Apple has once again pushed back big Siri updates. According to Gurman, the company actually intended to launch AI Siri with iOS 26.4, which is expected to be released in March. However, due to testing “issues”, the company is instead considering splitting major Siri updates and distributing them across multiple iOS updates. Gurman notes that this likely means iOS 26.5, which could launch in May, and iOS 27, which will likely be released in September, if it follows Apple’s usual release dates. But looking at Apple’s track record here, don’t hold your breath.

Upcoming AI Siri features are a struggle

According to Gurman’s sources, Apple is having trouble getting Siri to “properly handle queries” or respond quickly enough, which would defeat the purpose of using a smart assistant. Apple is reportedly pushing engineers to use iOS 26.5 to test these features, including the ability for Siri to use your personal data to answer questions. Users may be able to flip a switch in Settings to “preview” these features and treat the rollout as a beta.

Engineers also have trouble getting Siri app intents, or the functionality that lets Siri to act on your behalf, to work. You can ask Siri to open a picture, edit it, and then share it with a friend, but only if the feature itself actually works. This could also roll out with iOS 26.5, but it’s unclear due to reliability concerns. Siri also cuts off user prompts too early and sometimes uses ChatGPT instead of using Apple’s underlying technology, which would seem pretty bad for the company.

Apple is also testing new AI features for iOS 26.5 that we haven’t heard about yet. One of them is a new web search tool that works like other AI search features from companies like Perplexity and Google. You ask a question to search the web, and it returns a report with summaries and links. The other new feature is a custom image generation tool, which builds on Image Playground, but also faces development hurdles.

Looking even further, Apple plans more Siri advancements, namely adding features to the chatbot assistant, a la ChatGPT. (That said, it would use Gemini to power these features.) This version of Siri could even have its own app.

What’s going on with Siri AI?

It seems Siri really is Apple’s albatross. Although it arguably popularized smart assistants among the general public, Siri quickly fell behind Alexa and Gemini (née Google Assistant). Today, they 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 complicated questions, Siri still seems designed primarily to handle setting alarms and checking the weather.

This was going to change with iOS 18, alongside Apple Intelligence as a whole. Apple’s initial presentation for AI Siri was an assistant that could see what’s on your phone to better understand the questions you’re asking and take action on your behalf, i.e. the app’s intentions. You can ask Siri to edit an image you’ve viewed on your Photos app, and because the assistant knows the context, it will know which image you’re talking about and apply the changes you request. Or, you could ask when your friend was due to arrive, and Assistant would be able to scan messages and emails to find out that, first, your friend is visiting town this weekend, and second, that he sent you his flight itinerary that takes him to the airport at 3:55 p.m.

This Siri was never launched, however. While the company has rolled out iterative updates for Siri with a few AI-powered features, its redesign with these ambitious features has been a trial run for Apple’s AI team. This all stems from Apple’s problems with AI in general: the company was caught off guard by the wave of generative AI launched in late 2022 by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and following some resistance from the company’s leadership, it has been struggling to keep up ever since. Apple Intelligence launched its own half-baked problems, but rather than launch a half-baked Siri AI, the company struggled to develop the assistant in-house.

Part of the problem has to do with privacy: Unlike other tech companies, which have no problem scraping user data to train their models, Apple always wants to maintain privacy when deploying AI features. This therefore complicates their situation, as they need to ensure that the hardware and software involved meets these standards. You can’t ask Siri to pull user data into the cloud without strict security measures if you want to ensure that your users’ data remains private. The company is also focused on building its own hardware for cloud-based AI processing, rather than simply focusing on purchasing GPUs as many other companies have done.

Apple is the second most valuable technology company in the world, but a multitude of factors, including software, hardware, and leadership, mean that even Apple can’t magically produce an AI assistant. However, I’m not convinced that a Siri AI will move units for Apple in the first place. I can’t imagine Gemini moving people to Android, and you can download ChatGPT on any device you own. It’s even now integrated into your iPhone.