Why We're Not Getting That AI-Powered Siri Anytime Soon

If you were under the assumption that Siri was soon going to be supercharged with AI, you wouldn't be alone. In fact, Apple has advertised as much since last WWDC, showing off its ChatGPT-like assistant in commercials and promotional materials.

It's been nearly a year since WWDC 2024, and that new Siri is still not here. The thing is, it likely won't be for a long time. How long is anyone's guess (I've been tracking the delays here), but one thing seems for certain: Apple is not showing off AI Siri at next month's WWDC 2025.

Apple's AI program is a mess

In Mark Gurman's latest piece for Bloomberg, he describes a chaotic situation regrading Apple's AI department. The piece is a fascinating and in-depth look at Apple's AI woes, and I won't give a detailed summary of the entire article. However, I will briefly discuss what's going on, and how it related to AI Siri:

Executive leadership at Apple, including senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi, didn't believe AI was worth the investment, and didn't want to allocate resources away from Apple's core software components in order to develop the technology. But once Federighi used ChatGPT following its late 2022 launch, he did a 180. He and other Apple executives began meeting with the big AI companies to learn everything they could, and pushed for iOS 18 to have "as many AI-powered features as possible."

While Apple's AI department already existed before this scramble (the company had poached Google's artificial intelligence chief John Giannandrea), the engineers simply couldn't match the quality or accuracy of the tools provided by other companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, who had a huge head start on generative AI. That lag manifested in two ways: First, many of the AI features that Apple did bring to market were half-baked. Apple Intelligence's notification summaries feature, for example, infamously made some major mistakes, such as "summarizing" a BBC news alert to say that United Healthcare shooting suspect Luigi Mangione had shot himself. (Apple later disabled the feature for news alerts.)

Second, because Apple couldn't rely on its own tech to carry Apple Intelligence, they outsourced some tech to another AI company. While there was much debate about which company they should work with (Giannandrea wanted to work with Google and bring Gemini to iOS), Apple eventually settled for ChatGPT—which is why OpenAI's bot is built into your iPhone today.

Apple's lack of AI focus meant they missed the rush to acquire GPUs—the main processing unit used for training and running AI models. They also have strict privacy policies when it comes to user data, which severely limits what data they can use to train their models. (Some might say that's actually a good thing, and take a pause to think about the companies that do have a plethora of data to train with.)

Siri

While Apple was able to get some AI features working "well" enough to ship, Siri was never among them. In order to bring AI to Siri, the company had to split Siri's "brain" in two—one featuring the existing code, used for traditional Siri tasks like setting timers and making calls, and the other for AI. While the AI-side in a vacuum can work, integrating it with the other half of Siri's brain is problematic, and is the cause of much of the delay.

But rather than wait until Apple figured out how to get AI Siri working to actually show off its new features, the company went ahead and marketed them heavily. During WWDC 2024, we saw prerecorded demos of Siri taking complex requests, and generating helpful answers by accessing both a knowledge base about the user in question, as well as an awareness of what was happening on-screen. A prime example was an Apple employee asking Siri about their mom's travel itinerary: Siri dove through the employee's messages with their mom to draw up the plans.

Apple even hired Bella Ramsey of The Last of Us to promote AI Siri features: In the commercial, Ramsey sees someone at a party they recognize but don't remember the name of. Ramsey then asks Siri "What's the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Granel?" Siri immediately responds with the acquaintance's name, pulling from a calendar entry. Ramsey doesn't need to say the exact date or where to pull the information from, since AI Siri is presumably contextually aware, and can understand vague responses. (Apple has since deleted the ad from its YouTube account

Since then, AI features have trickled in on various iOS 18 updates, but not AI Siri. We've been following reports (mostly from Gurman) that Apple's engineers were having trouble getting it to work, and each delay pushed AI Siri's release to the next major iOS 18 update. At one point, we thought it could come with iOS 18.4: As Gurman reports in this latest piece, that was the plan, but Federighi himself was surprised to see that the AI Siri features didn't work on a beta for 18.4.

Siri's big AI upgrade was delayed again, and now "indefinitely." There are no plans to announce Siri's new features alongside iOS 19 next month. While the goal is to get AI Siri out for iOS 19 at some point, the situation is dire—Siri's features reportedly don't work a third of the time, and every time you fix one of Siri's major bugs, "three more crop up."

Gurman's sources say Apple has an AI department in Zurich working on a new LLM-based Siri that scraps the two-sided brain of the current assistant. Siri also has a new leader, Mike Rockwell, who replaced Giannandrea this spring. Some sources even say that Apple's internal chatbot is now rivaling ChatGPT, which could prove useful if integrated with Siri.

There are reasons to be mildly optimistic about Siri's long-term future, but there's no denying the last year has been a disaster. If you're excited for Siri's next big development, lower your expectations for the short-term.