Apple’s long-anticipated revamp of Siri with new AI features was initially rumored to arrive in April with the release of iOS 18.4, but then new rumors pointed to it being delayed again past that point.
Today, the company has acknowledged the situation. Indeed, the new AI-ified Siri is still a way off, as it was essentially harder to develop than Apple initially thought it would. We’re not sure what that says about Apple engineers’ prediction abilities.
Anyway, here’s the full statement from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, sent to Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber this morning:
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.
Did you catch that? The new release timeframe, at least officially, is “in the coming year”. Not “in the coming weeks” (Silicon Valley’s most loved phrase), not even “in the coming months”, but “in the coming year“.
That seems to imply a much bigger delay than even the newest rumors were anticipating. So if you’ve anxiously been waiting for the more personalized Siri, the one that “knows” you and can take actions inside apps on your behalf, well, get ready for a lot more waiting.
In the meantime, with the iOS 18.4 release next month Apple Intelligence (such as it is right now) will finally make it to the EU, and it will also become available in more languages.