Apple delays upgraded Siri: it’s taking ‘longer than we thought’

Apple’s more personalized Siri features need a little more time in the oven. Company spokesperson Jacqueline Roy gave this statement to Daring Fireball today announcing the delay:

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.

We’ve asked Apple to clarify exactly what “coming year” means.

When Apple introduced Apple Intelligence at WWDC last year, it showed off advanced features like Siri understanding your personal context and being able to take action based on what’s shown on your screen. Apple said at the time that those features would roll out “over the course of the next year,” and the general expectation was that they’d arrive this spring.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple executives, including software boss Craig Federighi, “voiced strong concerns internally that the features didn’t work properly — or as advertised — in their personal testing.” Gurman also says that people in Apple’s AI division “believe that work on the features could be scrapped altogether” and that the features may have to be rebuilt “from scratch.”

This weekend, Gurman reported that a ”true modernized, conversational version of Siri” might not arrive until iOS 20 “at best.”

Update: Added details from Bloomberg.