As part of its Apple Intelligence announcement, the Cupertino-based company revealed it was working on an overhaul of its Siri digital assistant that would incorporate aspects of Apple's version of AI. However, a massive new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reveals that Siri may be in trouble.
According to Gurman, Siri is facing so many engineering problems and software bugs that Siri 2.0 could be postponed or limited for a serious amount of time.
A revamped Siri was announced during the June WWDC conference alongside a number of other Apple Intelligence features, not all of which have even launched yet. For the first time ever, Apple has been slow rolling its latest version of iOS, meaning that not every AI feature Apple has shown off is ready or even available to iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro model owners.
Since October, iOS 18 has released Apple Intelligence in stages, and it has not been a smooth rollout to say the least. The recent iOS 18.3 update proved that Apple has work to do with features like AI-summary notifications getting turned off due to AI hallucinations or straight up misinformation.
Siri has existed since 2011 when it launched on the iPhone 4S. It was groundbreaking at the time but now is falling behind competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT — currently integrated with Siri — and Google's Gemini.
What is Siri 2.0 supposed to do?
When Apple announced the revamped Siri last summer, it was pitched that Siri would get a number of new features including:
- New visual animations and a light bar animation redesign
- Conversational context (or natural language responses)
- Typing to Siri
- On-screen awareness
- In-app actions across a ton of mostly Apple apps
Even then, it was revealed that the future of Apple's Siri wouldn't come all at once and a full update wasn't expected until the spring of 2025.
Up until Gurman's report today, it was expected that the forthcoming iOS 18.4 would launch with a number of Siri upgrades, likely in April. Specifically, personal context, on-screen awareness and in-app actions.
According to Gurman, Apple is apparently considering delaying that rollout until iOS 18.5, which may not launch until May.
"The goal is to ultimately offer a more versatile Siri that can seamlessly tap into customers’ information and communication," he writes.
Internally, it appears that Siri is not working consistently with any of the mentioned features and crunch-time is upon Apple's engineers with a potential iOS 18.4 developer beta potentially launching in late February.
A report from October of last year also claimed that Apple was "two years behind" on AI. This is mostly because Apple has prioritized two facets of its AI development; privacy and on-device AI versus cloud-based AI like that of OpenAI and Google. In the long run that may actually be more beneficial but in the short-term, it's possibly costing Apple and forcing the company to rush things.
We know Apple doesn't want to rely on ChatGPT, and, as with many things Apple, the company would prefer to have its own house-built AI assistant running on its company-designed chips and phones.
A leaked memo in January revealed that Apple had transitioned in an internal fixer, Kim Vorrath, who was given the mandate of "whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape."
As Siri's development finds itself hindered by engineering problems and bugs, it's more than likely that other aspects of Apple Intelligence and the general iOS 18 rollout are being pushed back as well. Gurman claims that features meant for iOS 19 out of the box may not launch until 2026.
In the meantime, we still have regular, increasingly outdated Siri who may not even be listening.
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