Apple confirms long delay for AI-boosted Siri assistant

Apple’s efforts with putting advanced AI capabilities across its ecosystem, the way Google has implemented them with Gemini, have a lot of ground left to cover. Among them is the Siri virtual assistant, which has remained a laggard and still hasn’t received the features Apple showcased at its developers conference last year.

Now, the company has officially confirmed that an overhauled Siri, one that can access locally stored user data and interact with apps, has been delayed until next year. Internally known as ”LLM Siri,” the next-gen makeover might not fully arrive until next year, but the delay could extend well into 2027.

“We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year,” an Apple spokesperson was quoted as saying by Daring Fireball.

Apple was reportedly eyeing an April launch for the upgraded Siri experience, which was expected to arrive with the iOS 18.4 update. Top Apple executives — including senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi — have voiced concerns about the planned features misfiring during internal tests, reports Bloomberg.

Apparently, some employees think the planned roadmap might be nixed altogether, forcing Apple to start from the ground up. As a stop-gap solution, Apple inked a deal with OpenAI to offer ChatGPT capabilities on iPhones and Mac, integrating it with Siri as part of the Apple Intelligence stack.

Despite ChatGPT bringing advanced language and multimodal capabilities such as image generation and file analysis, Siri is still missing a few crucial features that could truly lift the functional experience. For example, it still can’t take a look at user data and offer contextual responses, nor can it interact deeply with installed applications.

Google’s Gemini, which is now available natively on top-end Android devices, can tap into the data stored across its Workspace products such as Gmail, Docs, Maps, and even YouTube. Moreover, using a system of extensions, it can turn voice commands into actionable steps across different apps, including third-party apps such as Spotify.

Apple has clearly missed the train, and the latest delays don’t paint a particularly good picture of the innovation streak at the company. However, it is making some progress elsewhere. The company recently partnered with Alibaba and Baidu in China to speed up the development of Apple Intelligence for the local market.