Apple’s next-gen Siri isn’t arriving at WWDC 2025—and likely won’t be ready for quite a while. Despite splashy ads last year teasing a major AI overhaul, the promised upgrade remains stuck in development.
Internally, Apple’s AI efforts have been chaotic. Senior leadership, including Software Engineering head Craig Federighi, initially saw little value in chasing generative AI. That changed only after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022. Executives quickly shifted gears, hoping to pack iOS 18 with AI-driven tools.
Apple had already hired Google’s former AI chief, John Giannandrea, but even with his team in place, the company couldn’t keep up with OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic. Apple’s tools lacked both polish and accuracy. Features like notification summaries misfired badly—one incident falsely claimed a news alert involved a suicide in a high-profile case. The company quietly pulled the feature from news alerts after public backlash.
Because Apple’s internal tools couldn’t carry the weight, it turned to outside help. While some execs wanted to use Google’s Gemini, the company ultimately chose OpenAI. That’s why ChatGPT is now integrated into iPhones. Apple’s slow pivot meant they also missed the early race for GPUs, putting them even further behind in AI infrastructure. Their tight privacy rules limit data access, making training even harder.
Siri was never ready. Engineers had to split its functions into two systems—one for basic commands, the other for AI tasks. The integration has proven difficult, with bugs compounding instead of being resolved. Each new build broke something else. The AI component works in isolation, but connecting it to Siri’s legacy systems remains unreliable.
Still, Apple moved ahead with marketing. Last year’s WWDC featured demos of Siri pulling personal context and answering vague questions based on on-screen activity and past messages. Commercials even showed actors relying on Siri to recall old meetings using calendar entries and smart inference. Apple later deleted those promotional videos.
Updates to iOS 18 included scattered AI tools, but Siri’s upgrade remained missing. Engineers reportedly aimed to include it in iOS 18.4, but the features failed to function in beta. Federighi himself was caught off guard.
The upgrade is now delayed indefinitely. Siri’s AI tools reportedly fail one out of every three times, and fixes often break other parts. A new team in Zurich is developing a fresh assistant using a large language model that abandons the dual-system approach. Leadership has also shifted—Mike Rockwell now oversees the project, replacing Giannandrea.
Some insiders say Apple’s internal chatbot rivals ChatGPT. If accurate, that could reshape Siri’s future. But for now, those hoping for a smarter Siri will have to keep waiting. The past year has been rocky, and there’s little to suggest the rollout will happen soon.
