- Apple said it’s delaying its AI-powered Siri overhaul, which is now expected in the coming year.
- The Siri upgrade was announced in 2024 and promised a more personalized and capable virtual assistant.
- It’s rare for Apple to delay a product once it’s already been announced.
You can probably count on one hand the number of times Apple has publicly announced a product delay.
But Apple did just that on Friday, announcing that its plan for an AI overhaul to its virtual assistant, Siri, is taking longer than expected.
“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,” Jacqueline Roy, a company spokesperson, told the unaffiliated Apple blog Daring Fireball about the “more personalized” Siri.
It’s not the first time Apple has delayed a product after announcing it, but it’s a rare occurrence.
In 2016, AirPods were expected to go on sale in October, but Apple delayed the release until December. Before that, in 2011, the white iPhone 4 was released 10 months after the black model, as Daring Fireball author John Gruber wrote in his blog post about the delay.
And on one extremely rare occasion, Apple outright canceled a product after showing it off.
After its AirPower wireless charging mat was announced in 2017 with an expected 2018 launch, Apple confirmed that it was no longer in the works, apologizing to customers and saying that it had determined that the product would “not achieve our high standards.”
When Apple Intelligence was first announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2024, the tech giant highlighted an AI-powered Siri that could answer users’ more complex questions using personal context.
As AI features came to iOS 18 beginning in October, Apple said to expect new languages this spring, but it didn’t specify exactly when the new Siri would be ready. There have been some smaller tweaks to Siri since 2024, including ChatGPT integration, the ability to type out questions to Siri, and a more conversational assistant.
In September — ahead of the iPhone 16 release — Apple published an ad featuring the actor Bella Ramsey to demonstrate the “more personal” Siri’s ability to pull information from the Calendar app to help Ramsey remember someone’s name.
Now, it looks as if the highly anticipated upgrade won’t arrive on iPhones until 2026 or the next generation of its iOS operating system.
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