iPhone Users Must Keep Waiting: Major Siri AI Upgrade Still Far Off
Apple is under increasing pressure to act. Competitors like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Amazon have developed in-house solutions that enable natural conversations between humans and machines. And what does Apple have? Siri.
For years, Apple's voice assistant has been widely criticized by users. With the introduction of Apple Intelligence in iOS 18, expectations were high for significant improvements. Unfortunately, so far, aside from a refreshed design and minor enhancements in question comprehension, little has changed.
A major upgrade, internally dubbed "LLM Siri," was originally expected to debut with iOS 19. However, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that plan has now changed.
Apple's Future Plans
The usually well-informed Bloomberg reporter described Apple's current problems with the voice assistant. The report began with the iPhone manufacturer's plans for the near future. The presentation of the next Siri improvement is slated to happen next May.
This is 11 months after the first presentation at WWDC 2024, which will focus on the voice assistant's ability to rely on your personal data from Mail, Messages, and other apps to answer your questions.
According to Gurman, Siri works with two different "brains" under the hood. One is responsible for all the Siri commands you are familiar with. This includes things like creating timers, reminders, or making calls.
On the other side lies the system for advanced tasks. This brain will be able to analyze data on your iPhone. It is already being used in iOS 18 to better process requests. For instance, if you were to get lost in the middle of a Siri request and don't want to know about today's weather, but tomorrow's.
However, it took longer than hoped for to offer existing features of Apple Intelligence on the iPhone & other devices from the Cupertino company. The developers did not have enough time to merge these two "brains". In other words, the software will not work as well as intended.
iPhone Users Disappointed: Major Siri Update Pushed to 2025
This unification result is now set to be part of iOS 19. The update is expected to be announced yet again at the beginning of June as part of the annual WWDC developer conference. To be more specific, it will debut in iOS 19.4 in spring 2026.
This update should also include a major step forward: "LLM Siri" (Large Language Model), as it is internally known. However, according to Gurman, this has now also been delayed. It will not be shown in June or released as part of iOS 19.4.
"LLM Siri" should allow you to have conversations with Siri. ChatGPT or Gemini already offers such a feature today. This means you can have natural conversations with an AI assistant. However, all these are now delayed for iPhone users who want to use Siri for this purpose.
Before Apple can offer a real competitor to ChatGPT, Alexa, and similar programs, the underlying system has to be finalized. This is no easy task. For this reason, Gurman reasoned, employees of Apple's AI department are now convinced that a truly modernized and conversational version of Siri will not arrive until iOS 20 in 2027 debuts, and even then, this is the earliest expected timeframe.
However, the report even goes out on a limb. Gurman said, based on everything he's heard so far, iOS 19 will not include any significant changes to Apple Intelligence that are visible to the end user. For the millions of iPhone owners out there, however, it might not sound so tragic. According to Gurman, internal company data about currently available AI features suggests usage of them is extremely low in the first place.
Source: Bloomberg
