- Apple has reportedly delayed some of Siri’s AI features beyond iOS 26.4
- Apparently they will now arrive as part of iOS 26.5 or iOS 27
- These features were first announced in June 2024.
The much-promised Siri AI overhaul is turning out to be a huge embarrassment for Apple, as while it was initially announced in June 2024, at which point Apple said it would launch as part of iOS 18 that year, we’re now in 2026 and it’s still not here. Not only that, but it’s now reportedly being delayed even further.
We’d heard that it might finally arrive, at least in part, with iOS 26.4, which is expected to launch soon, but now Apple watcher Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg (via 9to5Mac), has said that at least some of the features that were previously planned for iOS 26.4 will now ship with iOS 26.5, expected in May, and iOS 27, expected in September.
Gurman, who has an excellent track record on Apple reporting, cites “people familiar with the matter” and adds that the most likely features to fail are “voice control of in-app actions” and “Siri’s expanded ability to access personal data,” which, as Gurman explains, “would allow users to ask the assistant to, for example, search through old text messages to locate a podcast shared by a friend and play it immediately.”
So if this is correct, the Siri AI overhaul won’t get most of its core features until about two years after it was first announced, and the parts that don’t arrive until iOS 27 will be two years later than Apple initially said it expected them.
An excessively long wait
Even in isolation, this would be a ridiculously long delay and isn’t very fair to customers, myself included, who upgraded to iPhone 16 series phones in part because of the promise of these features.
But it gets even worse when you consider how advanced Android is when it comes to AI features, as Gemini has delivered on much of what Apple has promised for Siri for years now.
In fact, Apple is so far behind that it appears to have – at least for the moment – essentially given up on trying to compete directly and has instead signed a deal with Google to use Gemini as the brains behind Siri. But even with that agreement in place, the wait continues.
Apple is no stranger to embarrassments and failures, from ‘antennagate’ and ‘bendgate’ to the terrible state in which Apple Maps launched and the abandoned AirPower wireless charger, but none of these problems have lasted as long as the current Siri debacle.
And not only is Siri far behind the competition here, but even before AI emerged, Siri was generally considered less capable than its rivals, so for some reason this is something Apple has struggled with in one way or another since the launch of Siri.
Hopefully, Siri will finally be competitive once this promised AI overhaul is delivered, but the way things have gone so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s delayed even further.
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