Siri’s Massive AI Overhaul is Still Coming This Year, Apple Insists
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Apple has taken the unusual step of weighing in after a report earlier this week claimed that the major Siri update planned for this year was once again facing delays. However, the company’s comments aren’t refuting the report entirely.
On Wednesday, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman dropped a bombshell when he reported that at least some of Siri’s improvements would be postponed due to “fresh problems” encountered during testing, according to insiders. These included things like not always processing queries properly or taking too long to handle requests.
As a result, Gurman believed that Apple would be spreading out Siri’s new capabilities across several updates, possibly pushing off the first phase until iOS 26.5 while delaying others until iOS 27 this fall.
For many Apple analysts and fans, this feels like a frustrating case of déjà vu, as we heard the same story the same time last year, when those improvements had been expected to show up in iOS 18.4. Many worried that history might be repeating itself, and if we were simply waiting for the other shoe to drop — again.
However, it looks like Apple wants to get ahead of the bad news on this one and at least reassure customers and investors that this isn’t the start of another year-long delay — especially after its stock dropped five percent yesterday following Gurman’s report and new scrutiny from the FTC over alleged biases in Apple News.
In a report on Apple’s worst trading day in months, CNBC’s Steve Kovach shared that Apple has reassured him that all the promised improvements will still arrive before the end of 2026:
Yesterday, around this time, we got that Bloomberg report that that big AI update to Siri that incorporates the Google Gemini technology — that has been internally pushed back. We were expecting it to launch in just a few weeks’ time. Now, according to Bloomberg, it’s not going to come out until May, and even then, it’s not going to be all the features necessarily that Apple originally promised nearly two years ago […] I will say that Apple says they will do it as promised by the end of this year.
Steve Kovach
Of course, it’s important to note what Apple didn’t say here. “By the end of this year” doesn’t technically contradict anything that Gurman reported. iOS 27 will undoubtedly come out in September, just like every other iOS update in the past 15 years, so even if Apple can’t get the new Siri ready for iOS 26.5, it will still meet that deadline — which arguably fits into Apple’s originally revised timeline.
Following last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple’s software and marketing chiefs, Craig Federighi and Greg “Joz” Joswiak, confirmed that Siri would be delayed into 2026. While many assumed — and Gurman reported — that this would be the spring, the execs were careful not to say that. The language they used was simply “the coming year,” and only when pushed did Joz acknowledge that, yes, this meant 2026.
In other words, Apple isn’t really saying anything here that it hasn’t said before, but the update is reassuring for those who feared that the current delays might have meant iOS 27.4 or beyond. If anything, we’re likely to see the even more powerful “Campos” chatbot update — effectively “Siri 3.0” — pushed into 2027, but so far, that’s strictly in the domain of rumors and not tangible Apple promises, and it’s fair to say that Apple is far more concerned about getting what it promised in 2024 out the door than worrying too much about when the next phase will be ready.
