The type of question Apple promises Siri will be able to answer with Apple Intelligence. Image source: Apple
While Apple scheduled and pushed out plenty of artificial intelligence-powered features in the last several months, the next batch of improvements to Siri aren’t going to arrive on time.
Like most other Big Tech companies, Apple has been making some pretty big strides in the AI space as of late. We’ve seen features like Genmoji, Image Playground, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence roll out over the past few months.
However, one feature that we were promised hasn’t materialized yet — the new, more personalized Siri. Siri was allegedly supposed to adopt a set of new Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.4, but it looks like that won’t be the case.
The reason for the delay is pretty unsurprising: the new Siri features aren’t up to Apple’s standards.
An Apple spokesperson told Daring Fireball that the company is facing a bit of an unexpected delay, but plans to introduce the new features “in the coming year.”
“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.”
This aligns with two reports, one in mid-February and another in early March, that suggested the voice-assistant may only get minor Apple Intelligence improvements before iOS 19.
This means features like Personal Context Understanding, In-App Actions, and Onscreen Awareness won’t make an appearance until July for beta users, and September for everyone else — if they even show up then.
When Apple first boasted about the feature in ads, it showed how someone could ask Siri the name of someone they met before and it would read their calendar for the answer. Another feature would allow a user to ask about a sports team, then say “when do they play next?” and Siri would add that event to their calendar.
Siri currently remains an unfinished hybrid of its old and new features, which hasn’t been going quite as well as one would hope.
