If you got a chance to see Apple's WWDC 2024 last June, you got to hear about a very exciting future for Siri.
As part of the Apple Intelligence features that would roll out later in 2024, Apple's digital assistant was set to get a whole lot smarter, boosted by Apple's push into artificial intelligence.
The days of awkward exchanges between you and Sir would be over. Instead, Apple executives painted a picture of free-flowing conversations with the digital assistant, as Siri was able to recognize content on your screen like dates, phone numbers and other details and take action based on what it saw.
And of course, you'd be able to direct Siri to take action across a lot of different apps that had been previously closed off to the digital assistant.
It's been nine months since that WWDC 2024 keynote, and it's safe to say that the vision of Siri Apple spelled out that day has yet to materialize. And it doesn't seem likely to for some time, by Apple's own admission.
A Siri-ous Problem
Siri has undergone some improvements thanks to Apple Intelligence, such as a new visual cue for when the assistant is active on the iPhone.
When talking to the assistant on an iPhone 15 Pro or later, you can correct yourself in mid-sentence without confusing Siri and you can ask follow-up questions.
"The problem isn’t that Apple has delayed smarter Siri. The problem is that Apple promised smarter Siri as a reason to purchase its devices today."
Avi Greengart, Techsponential
But the marquee features of context awareness and Siri support across apps have yet to materialize in the current version of iOS 18.
And with Apple confirming that these improvements may not show up until 2026, users of Apple products are getting a little bit antsy about Apple's high-profile AI efforts.
That's nothing compared to the feelings within Apple headquarters itself, apparently. As I was working on this article, Bloomberg published a report of an all-hands meeting for the Siri division in which Robby Walker, a senior director at the company, acknowledged Apple's missteps.
Specifically, Walker reportedly told Apple employees that the company shouldn't have promoted the Siri features before they were complete. "“This was not one of these situations where we get to show people our plan after it’s done. We showed people before,” Walker told employees, according to Bloomberg's account.
Siri's delay is obviously embarrassing for Apple, as no company likes to push back promised features. But it's fair to wonder if the delay hints at bigger problems for the company.
"The problem isn’t that Apple has delayed smarter Siri," said Avi Greengart, lead analyst at Techsponential when I asked him about the significance of Apple's decision to push back some of the bigger Siri improvements.
"The problem is that Apple promised smarter Siri as a reason to purchase its devices today."
Why Siri 2.0's absence stands out
In some ways, Siri is just one part of the Apple Intelligence puzzle, with Apple also delivering AI features like Writing Tools to suggest tonal changes, photo-editing and image-generating capabilities and assorted summarization tools.
Many of those additions are now in place, with some even winning praise for their usefulness and the way they fit into users' workflows.
But the fact is, these are very rudimentary AI capabilities — nice things to have on hand, but hardly the revolutionary tools AI advocates are promising.
More to the point, Apple Intelligence features also mirror what you can find on devices from Samsung and Google, only Galaxy AI and Google's offerings are much more polished at this point.
After the first Apple Intelligence features emerged with the iOS 18.1 update last fall, I wrote that Apple's AI efforts felt very much like a work in progress. We're now up to the iOS 18.4 beta, with the first preview of iOS 19 likely to show up in a few months, and I'd still have the same assessment of Apple Intelligence. And I'm not alone in that view.
"Today’s Apple Intelligence is not a compelling set of features," Greengart wrote in a research note published in the wake of Apple's announcement that Siri improvements were delayed. "Genmoji is fun, few people need AI help adjusting the tone of their iMessages, and having AI summarize messages vacillates between being genuinely useful and an annoyance."
A much more sophisticated version of Siri like the one Apple was promoting last June would have been a significant step forward. Without those changes in place, Apple's rivals have a golden opportunity to race even farther ahead on the AI front.
Is Apple too far behind?
Take Samsung's Galaxy AI, which debuted in 2024 with the release of the Galaxy S24 and saw some significant updates this year with the Galaxy S25.
The most promising change is the addition of Samsung's Personal Data Engine, which uses your activity on the S25 models to offer personalized suggestions and actions.
"The problem with delaying Siri is that users will get used to Gemini and other alternatives. This will set an increasingly higher bar, and Siri may always be playing catch up."
Ranjit Atwal, Gartner
That's going to be most evident in the Now Brief feature on board the S25 models, with AI surfacing information that's relevant to the day ahead.
In our Galaxy S25 testing, Now Brief was pretty rudimentary , but the promise is that it will get smarter over time as the Personal Data Engine learns more about the person using the phone.
A more immediate benefit for Galaxy S25 users is the integration of Google's Gemini assistant and its ability to perform various actions across apps — searching for a list of restaurants that meet certain criteria and then texting that information to friends, all with one command. That's far ahead of anything Siri can offer at this point.
"The problem with delaying Siri is that users will get used to Gemini and other alternatives," said Gartner analyst Ranjit Atwal. "This will set an increasingly higher bar, and Siri may always be playing catch up."
Techsponential's Greengart agrees that Apple trails the likes of Samsung, Google, Amazon and Meta when it comes to next-generation AI features, but adds that the lead is not insurmountable — yet.
"Do they have enough of a lead that it will matter?" he said. "Will any of this stuff work well enough for consumers to trust and come to rely on it?"
What's next for Apple
Adding to the concerns over Siri's future is uncertainty over just when we'll see the delayed features that Apple first touted in June 2024. Logic would dictate that the delay would mean the features would now be part of this year's iOS 19 release, but even that's up in the air.
A Bloomberg report on the issues Apple was running into implementing new features with Siri suggested that the features might not be ready for the public until early next year.
Even then, there was some talk in that report that the features would be scrapped, with Apple starting from square one — a move that would definitely push back the launch of Siri 2.0 into 2026, possibly as part of iOS 20.
iOS 19 rumors have started emerging, and they're not particularly encouraging on that front. Most of the rumors so far are focusing on an interface overhaul for Apple's iPhone software — an important change, certainly, but not one that says anything about Apple's plans for Siri.
To that end, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has reported that iOS 19 could see more apps making use of Apple Intelligence. But worrying, Gurman added that "everything I’ve heard suggests that iOS 19 will not include any significant consumer-facing changes to Apple Intelligence."
We'll get the definitive picture of what Apple's plans are at WWDC 2025, which you'd expect to take place in June. A public beta of iOS 19 would follow in the summer.
"The biggest thing Apple could do is release genAI-enhanced Siri in beta, so we can see how capable or limited it is in the real world, not just in WWDC mock-ups and ads," Greengart said.
For my part, I'm hoping Apple uses the spotlight granted by its developer conference to directly address the delayed Siri's features, giving us a realistic timeline for when we can expect changes to arrive. Basically, the discussion Apple had in the all-hands meeting reported on by Bloomberg should happen in some form at WWDC, with Apple speaking directly to its developers and its customers.
Delays happen; it's how companies respond to them that determines just how concerned we should be.
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