Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy, in a statement provided seemingly first to both Stephen Nellis, of Reuters, and John Gruber:
[…] 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.
Unsurprisingly, this news comes on a Friday and is announced via a carefully circulated statement instead of on Apple’s own website. It is a single feature, but it is a high-priority one showcased in its celebrity infused ads for its flagship iPhone models. I think Apple ought to have published its own news instead of relying on other outlets to do its dirty work, but it fits a pattern. It happened with AirPods and again with AirPower; the former has become wildly successful, while the latter was canned.
This announcement reflects rumours of the feature’s fraught development. Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in February:
The company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to customers. But Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Some features, originally planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later, they said.
Do note how “or later” is doing the bulk of the work in this paragraph. Nevertheless, he seems to have forecasted the delay announced today.
While it is possible to reconcile Apple’s “coming year” timeline with Gurman’s May-or-later availability while staying within the current release cycle, the statement is a tacit acknowledgement these features are now slated for the next major versions of Apple’s operating system, perhaps no sooner than a release early next year. I do not see why Apple would have issued this statement if it were confident it could ship personalized Siri before September’s new releases. That is a long time between marketing and release for any company, and particularly so for Apple.
This is a risk of announcing something before it is ready, something the WWDC keynote is increasingly filled with. Instead of monolithic September releases with occasional tweaks throughout the year, Apple adopted a more incremental strategy. I would like to believe this has made Apple’s software more polished — or, less charitably, slowed its quality decline. What it has actually done is turn Apple’s big annual software presentation into a series of promises to be fulfilled throughout the year. To its credit, it has almost always delivered and, so, it has been easy to assume the hot streak will continue. This is a good reminder we should treat anything not yet shipping in a release or beta build as a potential feature only.
The delay may ultimately be good news. It is better for Apple to ship features that work well than it is to get things out the door quickly. Investors do not seem bothered; try spotting the point on today’s chart when Gruber and Reuters published the statements they received. And, anyway, most Apple Intelligence features released so far seem rushed and faulty. I would not want to see more of the same. Siri has little reputation to lose, so it makes sense to get this round of changes more right than not.
Besides, Apple only just began including the necessary APIs in the latest developer betas of iOS 18.4. No matter when Apple gets this out, the expansiveness of its functionality is dependent on third-party buy-in. There was a time when developer adoption of new features was a given. That is no longer the case.
According to Gurman as recently as earlier this week, a May release is possible (Update: Oops, I should have checked again.), but I would bet against it. If his reporting is to be believed, however, the key features announced as delayed today require a wholly different architecture which Apple was planning on merging with the existing Siri infrastructure midway through the iOS 19 cycle. It seems possible to me the timeline on both projects could now be interlinked. After all, why not? It is not like Siri is getting worse. No rush.