Latest news with #WWDC24
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Report: Siri's Long-Delayed AI Features May Arrive With iOS 26.4
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing. Eager to try out those AI-powered Siri features Apple announced last year? Sorry, you will have to wait until next year. As Bloomberg reports, citing sources familiar with the development, Apple is now targeting a spring 2026 release for some long-delayed Siri AI features. That includes Siri's ability to tap into users' personal context and take actions based on what's displayed on screen. In a demo at WWDC 24, an Apple executive asked Siri for their mom's flight details. Siri scanned an email from their mom to find the flight information and then checked the live status online before providing a response. This version of an advanced Siri was supposed to arrive with iOS 18. However, in March, Apple said, "It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features, and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year." While "coming year" might have suggested 2025, Apple clarified earlier this week that it meant 2026. Bloomberg now reports that the update will arrive with iOS 26.4. Historically, the ".4" update for iOS has arrived in March, and the same can be expected of iOS 26. The exact date is yet to be decided, but internally, Apple isn't expecting a date beyond spring, sources tell Bloomberg. For the delay, Apple has blamed Siri's underlying V1 architecture. The team working on Siri found "that the limitations of the V1 architecture weren't getting us to the quality level that we knew our customers needed and expected," said Craig Federighi, Apple's software boss, in an interview following WWDC 2025. Once the company realized the issues, it moved to V2. Federighi called it a "deeper end-to-end architecture that we knew was ultimately what we what we wanted to create to get to the full set of capabilities that we wanted for Siri." An earlier report also suggested that things started falling apart when Apple tried to integrate old Siri code with new. The wait for a supercharged Siri continues. In the meantime, Apple must also deal with the lawsuits that stemmed from its inability to release these features on time.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Apple executives say new AI-powered Siri wasn't 'demoware,' it just wasn't ready to ship
In a handful of interviews following Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 25), Apple executives denied that last year's demonstrations of a personalized, AI-powered Siri were vaporware, despite having yet to launch. Asked by The Wall Street Journal why Apple, with all its engineers and cash, couldn't make the technology work well enough to ship, the company didn't admit to being behind in the AI race. Instead, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi stressed that AI was a new technology, and something Apple sees more as a "long-term transformational wave" that will impact the industry and society for decades to come. "There's no need to rush out with the wrong features and the wrong product just to be first," Federighi noted. Federighi also explained, in an interview with Tom's Guide and Techradar, that Apple showed off the new Siri at WWDC 24 because the company knew that the world wanted "a really complete picture of what's Apple thinking about the implications of Apple Intelligence and where it's going." He said that Apple had two versions of the AI architecture for Siri, the first of which (version 1) it demonstrated in the video shown at the event. But as development progressed, the team knew that it would have to move the version 2 architecture if it wanted to meet customers' expectations. This new version is still set to ship in 2026, Federighi confirmed. The execs also pushed back against the idea that Apple had not shown off functional technology at WWDC 24. Federighi told the Journal: "We were filming real working software with a real large language model with real semantic search." Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak added, "There's this narrative out there that it's demoware only. No, it was... something we thought, as Craig said, we'd actually ship by later in the year." Joswiak said Apple realized it would disappoint customers if it did so, because the software had an "error rate that we felt was unacceptable." The execs also talked more broadly about Apple's plans for AI, which are not to build a chatbot to rival ChatGPT and others, but to infuse intelligence across its operating systems. "This wasn't about us building a chatbot... we weren't defining what Apple Intelligence was to be our chatbot," Federighi told Tom's Guide. "That was never our want to bring intelligence deeply integrated into the experience of all of our platforms in a way that's 'meet you where you are' -- not that you're going off into some chat experience in order to get things done." Apple's real goal, the execs said, was to give developers tools to tap into Apple's foundation models to build more intelligent apps. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
