2 days ago
Apple Explains Why It Delayed AI Siri, Confirms It Won't Arrive Until 2026
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.
Apple's AI-powered Siri upgrade wasn't part of WWDC 2025, but two of the company's representatives have spoke about the delay and what the future holds for the tool. Apple originally revealed an AI-powered Siri back in June 2024 showing how the assistant could work across your device's apps.
The company then confirmed in March that the features were delayed. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple's SVP of software, Craig Federighi, and SVP of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, spoke about the delay.
'We don't want to disappoint customers", said Joswiak. "We never do but it would have been disappointing to ship something that didn't hit our quality standard that had an error rate that we felt was unacceptable."
Federighi said later in the conversation that the feature didn't 'work reliably enough to be an Apple product.' He also said he believes no other rival service is currently able to reliably automate processes on devices.
In another interview with TechRadar and Tom's Guide, Joswiak confirmed these features won't be launching until 2026. The company had previously said it'd be arriving in the "coming year,' which caused confusion on whether it meant in the next 12 months or at some stage in 2026.
That may mean we see these get added in a later version of iOS 26, or they may possibly even come in iOS 27. Federighi said, "We will announce the date when we're ready to seed it."
Apple also confirmed its issues with the assistant stemmed from the underlying architecture used to develop it. Federighi said the company was working on two versions simultaneously with one version running on "a deeper end-to-end architecture."
Federighi said, "We realized that V1 architecture, we could push and push and put in more time, but if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards, and that we had to move to the V2 architecture."
Federighi also spoke to YouTuber iJustine where he confirmed Apple plans to ship everything it has previously announced as part of an AI-powered Siri. He shared that there were more features to come, but the company wants to hold fire on announcing anything further until it's ready to launch.
The features previously announced include awareness across an iPhone allowing Siri to interact with various apps at the same time. One example used in the original launch showed Siri finding a photo of a driver's license in Apple Photos, taking the ID number from it and adding it into the relevant section on a web form.
