Personal Siri Still Won’t Arrive Until Spring 2026
Credit: Apple
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Apple didn’t have much to say about Siri during last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote, but that hardly came as a surprise. Reports leading up to the event suggested the company was reluctant to make any bold announcements after it failed to deliver on the more personalized Siri that it promised at last year’s WWDC24.
It’s somewhat unfortunate since Apple successfully delivered most of the Apple Intelligence features it announced for iOS 18. They didn’t all show up once, but by April’s release of iOS 18.4, the only thing missing was the more personalized Siri. Sadly, that was also the one component people were most excited about. After all, as useful as Image Playground and Writing Tools are, they were also merely Apple’s spin on something nearly every other AI company had already done.
As it turns out, Apple did have some new Apple Intelligence features to show off at this year’s keynote, but they were part of a more focused and integrated experience rather than AI for its own sake. For example, Live Translation and Workout Buddy are genuinely helpful features that expand on existing technologies.
Apple also offered some small but meaningful enhancements to the tools it released in iOS 18.2, including Visual Intelligence for screenshots and new image generation features in Genmoji and Image Playground. However, Apple’s voice assistant was conspicuously absent during last Monday’s keynote presentation.
The word “Siri” was used twice, both times during software chief Craig Federighi’s recap of Apple Intelligence, when he formally acknowledged that the work on “the features that make Siri even more personal” needs “more time to reach our high quality bar.” After that, we didn’t hear a peep about Apple’s voice assistant — even parenthetically. For the rest of the keynote, it was as if Siri never existed.
Of course, Apple is still actively working on a more intelligent version of its voice assistant. However, Federighi didn’t offer a timeline during the keynote other than to say, “We look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.”
It wasn’t until after the WWDC keynote, when Federighi and worldwide marketing SVP Greg Joswiak sat down for a follow-up interview, that they clarified what this means, with Joz conceding that “the coming year” means 2026.
That’s another revelation that shouldn’t be too surprising. The phrase “in the coming year” already implies that, although some have suggested that Apple measures years in software lifecycles,” such that iOS 26 marks the beginning of a new year for Apple. Certainly, it’s the mark of a new era, but it seems that “in the coming year” still means the calendar year that’s yet to come.
Still, hope reigns eternal, and many still wanted to think that maybe this was a case of Apple underpromising and — hopefully — overdelivering. After all, once burned, twice shy.
Sadly, that’s not what insiders are telling Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In a recent follow-up report, Gurman says that Apple has indeed set an internal release target of spring 2026, which likely puts it around the release of iOS 26.4.
If you’ve been following along, you probably remember that Gurman said the same thing last year, not long after Apple first announced the new Siri capabilities. Reports then said Apple was planning for an iOS 18.4 release in the spring of 2025. Hence, nobody got too concerned when the improved voice assistant wasn’t showing up in earlier iOS 18 point releases. It wasn’t until the iOS 18.4 betas seemed inexplicably delayed that it became clear that Apple was struggling and “Somewhat was Rotten in the State of Cupertino,” as John Gruber amusingly put it.
Still, one would reasonably expect that Apple had pushed Siri off until iOS 18.4 last year to focus on its other Apple Intelligence features. Writing Tools, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence, and others all arrived in a relatively timely fashion. It’s not hard to imagine how much work was involved in getting those ready, not to mention Apple’s efforts to ramp up its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure to help carry the extra load of requests that couldn’t be done on-device.
By comparison, iOS 26 is far lighter on heavy AI features. Live Translation may be the most involved, but the others are slow softball pitches by comparison, and Apple is even leaning more heavily on ChatGPT for some things, such as new styles in Image Playground.
Still, it’s understandable that Apple has even more incentive to get this one right. Several reports earlier this year suggested that the large language models they were using to underly the new Siri were wrong about a third of the time. Ultimately, the company was forced to scratch that and move to a new architecture, as Federighi explained last week.
The good news is that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll have to wait another year before we see anything. “If the next several weeks of development work proves promising, the company could consider giving a preview of the features when it launches the next iPhones in the fall,” Gurman was told by one of his sources. That’s a pretty big “if” and no final decisions have been made, but it’s not hard to imagine that Apple is eager to have something tangible it can demo as soon as possible.
The delays in the more context-aware Siri have also held Apple back even further. Last fall, Gurman was told that Apple aimed to have a more conversational Siri ready for iOS 19.4 (what would now be iOS 26.4). While it’s still aiming for that as its ultimate goal — an upgrade that would “turn the assistant into an always-on device copilot that’s more conversational,” Gurman says — it’s unlikely we’ll see that before 2027.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
