The truly overhauled Siri that Apple has promised reportedly might not be ready until 2027.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is running way behind on meaningful upgrades for its voice assistant and "conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best." The slow, staggered, and sometimes delayed rollout of Apple Intelligence features has already indicated that Apple is struggling to deliver a more advanced Siri, akin to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
But now, Apple is in a full-blown "AI crisis" and facing "make-or-break" moment to meet sky-high expectations or risk losing its competitive edge altogether, said Gurman.
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To be clear, Siri is getting smarter in some areas. The upcoming iOS 18.5 will reportedly enable Siri to tap into users' personal data to elicit more customized responses and "take action" across apps.
But at the center of the crisis is Siri's functionality, which currently relies on a patchwork combination of the legacy system for simpler commands and a more advanced version that handles Apple Intelligence queries. The plan was to merge the two systems into one system dubbed internally "LLM Siri," in time for the iOS 18 launch, but that didn't happen in time.
Apple was planning to bring LLM Siri to the iOS 19 release at WWDC this coming June, but that plan is reportedly delayed now too. That means the iOS 19 update might not come with any significant Apple Intelligence updates, and LLM Siri might be pushed back to the next product cycle, iOS 20.
This heaps onto an already disappointing rollout of Apple Intelligence, which Gurman reports has "extremely low" usage according to internal data. Currently, Apple Intelligence consists of AI features like writing tools, voicemail and audio transcriptions, custom emojis called Genmoji, and Image Playground for AI-generated cartoon images. Such features are mildly helpful or fun novelties, but hardly the vital use cases Apple is looking for.
Apple Intelligence also provides AI-generated summaries of notifications, messages, and emails, but some users have found these summaries to be annoying at best, and scarily inaccurate at worst, like when it falsely claimed suspected Healthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione shot himself. Apple subsequently suspended AI news summaries for the time being.
Meanwhile, Amazon just debuted an updated version of its voice assistant, Alexa+ which has the conversational capabilities, third-party app integration, and agentic AI features Apple is probably aiming for with Siri. All eyes are on Apple now to see if it can close the gap.
