It was hoped that the launch of Apple Intelligence would give the company’s Siri voice assistant a much-needed upgrade. But almost nine months on from the announcement of this plan, there’s no sign of its arrival–and further delays are now hindering Apple’s attempts to compete in the AI arena.
In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman builds on a prediction he made last month: that the new Apple Intelligence-powered version of Siri isn’t likely to be released until iOS 18.5 in May, an astonishing 11 months after it was unveiled at WWDC 2024. At the time Gurman cited bugs and features that still don’t work consistently.
But the article adds further bad news. Whereas the new version of Siri forms (a surprisingly late) part of the iOS 18 release cycle, a more radical shakeup is slated as part of iOS 19, and this one faces major delays too.
Known internally as LLM Siri, this will be built from the ground up around Apple Intelligence. (The upcoming version of Siri, Gurman says, is a grafted-together hybrid system with “two brains” that handle legacy commands and AI functions separately.) Aside from this new architecture, iOS 19 Siri was planned to feature a “more conversational approach,” but this has hit developmental obstacles and won’t be included when the other elements of iOS 19 Siri are announced at WWDC 25 this June.
This was always likely when AI Siri first started struggling. Resources have to be pulled from longer-term projects to fight fires in the short term, and that means a cascade of delays stretching into the future. And Gurman thinks it’s going to get worse before it gets better. “People within Apple’s AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027,” he writes.
With other companies hurrying to hone their own AI offerings, Apple faces a struggle to remain relevant. No wonder Gurman calls this “an even bleaker timeline than many of us imagined.”