- Apple has explained why the Siri AI overhaul has taken so long
- The company initially created an “iterative” version on top of the existing Siri, but it fell short of Apple’s vision.
- So, Siri was rebuilt from the ground up.
The Siri AI overhaul is finally coming later this year, much later than initially promised, but Apple has now shed some light on why, exactly, it took so long.
In a post-WWDC talk attended by 9to5Mac and TechRadar, Mike Rockwell, the Apple executive who took over leadership of the Siri team last year, explained that, in 2025, the company managed to build a working version of Siri AI “that was kind of an incremental over the original Siri,” but that “we didn’t feel like it was really meeting the vision and the experience that we wanted to make.”
As a result, the team “rebuilt Siri from the ground up, literally tearing it down,” and the end result was “a profoundly more capable Siri.”
A necessary change of strategy
So, in other words, it seems like Apple backed away from an initial plan to add existing Siri after realizing this wouldn’t be enough for expectant fans, and then started working on the long job of completely rebuilding its digital assistant.
It’s debatable whether this is a satisfactory explanation: one could argue that a company as talented and experienced as Apple should have already known what it would take to build a true AI assistant, especially when there were many rival models that the company could turn to for inspiration.
But at least it goes some way to explaining why all this effort has taken so long. And while Apple’s initial goal of delivering an incremental update may have been short-sighted, the ultimate decision to abandon it and rebuild Siri from scratch was probably the right one, given how impressive the competition is in this space.
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