Apple Delays Much-Anticipated AI Updates for its Siri Assistant

Apple has delayed the release of the new AI features for its Siri assistant that were revealed during its WWDC conference in June 2024. The “more personal Siri,” which will gain awareness of users’ personal context and the ability to take action in and across apps will now be released “in the coming year,” Apple said today.

Here’s the statement shared with Apple blogger John Gruber and other media outlets today:

“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. 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.”

Apple started the week with a bang with the reveal of four new products: The new iPad Airs with M3 chips, the 11th-gen iPad with an A16 chip, the M4-powered MacBook Air, and the new Mac Studio with M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips. However, the company now finishing the week with a bad mark with this statement released on Friday afternoon on the US East Coast. And you can bet that the timing for this announcement was calculated.

If Apple Intelligence was probably the biggest news coming from Apple’s WWDC conference last year, the company is now taking way too much time to deliver. We had to wait until December to see Siri get a new ChatGPT integration with the release iOS 18.2. As for iOS 18.3, which was released in January, it disabled Apple Intelligence notification summaries for the News Entertainment category of apps following multiple reports of erroneous news breaks.

iOS 18.4, which is coming in April alongside iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4, will make Apple Intelligence available in more languages including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified), and localized English for Singapore and India. However, Apple also confirmed last month that Apple Intelligence would “continue to expand with new features in the coming months, including more capabilities for Siri.”

Well, Apple now releasing a statement to say that this more conversational Siri would be released “in the coming year” raises a lot of questions. It opens the door to the company making the AI upgrades for Siri part of iOS 19 instead of iOS 18, which was the initial plan. Anyway, the delay comes just as Amazon prepares to roll out its next-gen Alexa+ assistant in the US.

If Apple pioneered digital assistants with the release of Siri on the iPhone 5 back in 2011, it doesn’t appear that the company has what it takes to catch up with its competitors in the AI race. And unfortunately for Apple, this new delay is only going to aggravate the persisting perception problem causing Siri to be seen as the worst AI assistant on the market.