Apple Intelligence: Apple must move smarter Siri, deletes promotional video
It had already become apparent: Apple's developers have not yet managed to fundamentally improve Siri. The new date is a long way off.
Apple's Siri: Central AI element on the iPhone coming later.
(Image: Koshiro K / Shutterstock)
Apple will not be offering AI functions for iOS that were announced last summer until next year. A spokesperson for the company confirmed this to Apple blogger John Gruber on Friday. According to the statement, the company's developers need more time to roll out a "more personalized Siri". "It will take longer than we thought to deliver these features, and we expect to roll them out next year." There had already been rumors to this effect, which have now been confirmed. iOS 18.5 will not yet have these features either.
Personal context and app usage will come later
In practice, this means that the smarter Siri will only appear with iOS 19, which is expected to be unveiled in summer and will then be launched in September – but not with the first versions. The one-year wait would therefore mean spring 2026, around iOS 19.4 or 19.5. The features that will not be implemented until then include the so-called personal context and the ability to perform actions within and across apps directly by voice input. Apple was planning to adapt its App Intents API for this purpose, meaning it also needed the cooperation of third-party app developers.
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The "better personalized Siri" was already advertised by Apple last September. In an advertising video that the company took offline, a well-known actress was shown letting Siri help her remember a person from a meeting in the past. To do this, the voice assistant had to access the personal context. Apple always emphasized that the information is retrieved "on device", i.e. via a language model provided on the device. If this is not sufficient, the company uses its privacy-friendly PCC cloud infrastructure. Other examples of the personal context would be: "Play the podcast that Anna recommended to me" or "When does mom's plane land?" – All things for which Siri needs device information.
Talkative Siri wasn't even announced yet
On the Mac and iPad, the improved Siri is now not expected before a later version of macOS 16 and iPadOS 19, and on the Vision Pro not before visionOS 3. Apple Intelligence itself will be released in German for the first time in April; currently, the functions can only be used in English.
Observers had also expected Apple to make Siri more conversational overall. Although this has already been partially implemented with iOS 18, Apple simply cannot compete with chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude. Siri still doesn't understand all the terminology and doesn't spit out the correct information, which has been extremely frustrating for years. But this more chatbot-like Siri hasn't even been announced yet and isn't due to arrive before iOS 19 or even iOS 20. Instead, the voice assistant has been able to access ChatGPT since the launch of Apple Intelligence. In China, however, Apple relies on local partners.
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