Gurman: Apple’s More Conversational Siri May Not Be Ready Until 2027

As Amazon gets ready to release its next-gen Alexa+ assistant in the US this month, it’s becoming critical for Apple to deliver a similar update for Siri. The more capable version of Apple’s assistant that was first demoed at the company’s WWDC 2024 conference is still nowhere to be seen, and it may take a couple more years for Apple to finally catch up to the competition.

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman explained the challenges that Apple is currently facing in releasing the Siri features it first advertised in June 2024. Apple promised a new version of Siri with onscreen awareness that can take action in and across apps. By being aware of users’ personal context, the assistant will also be able to remember what users said in a previous conversation and make its responses more grounded and useful.

We may finally see the new Siri features previously seen at WWDC 2024 in May with the release of iOS 18.5. However, Apple’s work on a more conversational version of Siri is reportedly far from done. The problem, according to Gurman, is that Apple will need more time to merge the previous Siri backend with limited features with the new backend that can handle more complex queries.

“For iOS 19, Apple’s plan is to merge both systems together and roll out a new Siri architecture,” Gurman explained. “I expect this to be introduced as early as Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June of this year — with a launch by spring 2026 as part of iOS 19.4. The new system, dubbed “LLM Siri” internally, was supposed to also introduce a more conversational approach in the same release. But that is now running behind as well and won’t be unveiled in June.

Gurman previously mentioned this “LLM Siri” and its expected 2026 release date in November. However, the reporter now believes that the next-gen large language model powering this new version of Siri may not match the existing conversational features found in ChatGPT and other assistants like Gemini, Copilot, and Alexa+ until 2027.

“Before Apple can go full-throttle on development of that Siri, which is supposed to finally work more like ChatGPT and the new Alexa, Apple will need to get the underlying system fixed. And that won’t be easy,” Gurman explained. “That’s why 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.

Apple needing two more years to make Siri catch up to the competition would be devastating for a company that prides itself on not being first, but best. And it’s also impossible to imagine how far ahead OpenAI and its competitors will be in two years.

It’s not clear if it makes sense for Apple to keep working on its own large language models for Siri when the competition already offers far better models. While Siri can already tap into ChatGPT on Apple devices that support Apple Intelligence, users ask to explicitly ask for Siri to do that.

There could be better ways to do this. Microsoft’s Copilot assistant may not get the same momentum as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, but Microsoft just dropped usage restrictions on its conversational features, which are powered by OpenAI’s o1 model.