Apple may finally be ready to roll out its smarter, more personalized Siri features before the 2025 holiday season, according to The New York Times. The publication cited three sources with knowledge of Apple’s plan to release a virtual assistant “in the fall” that can edit and send photos to a friend on request — features that were supposed to arrive in iOS 18.
This is the earliest prospective rollout timeline we’ve seen so far. Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy said in a statement to Daring Fireball in March that the company expects to start releasing its upgraded Siri features “in the coming year.” Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said Apple’s AI department believes a ”true modernized, conversational version of Siri” won’t be ready until 2027 “at best” due to difficulties with development.
Some of the delays were reportedly caused by leadership issues within the company. John Giannandrea, who formerly led AI and Siri at Apple, was replaced in March after CEO Tim Cook “lost confidence” in his capabilities according to a report from Bloomberg, while The Information reports that senior Apple director Robby Walker and software executive Sebastien Marineau-Mes butted heads over who should oversee Siri’s upgrade project. Several former employees from Apple’s AI and machine learning (AI/ML) group singled Walker out to the publication as lacking the ambition or risk-taking necessary to revamp Siri, and that the team had been dubbed “AIMLess” by internal engineers.
The New York Times reports that earlier setbacks for the project occurred in 2023 when Cook’s efforts to double the team’s budget for AI chips were reportedly dashed by Luca Maestri, Apple’s finance chief. Maestri reportedly “reduced the increase to less than half that” and instead directed the team to make their existing chips — 50,000 of which were more than five years old — more efficient. Sources with knowledge of Cook’s request told the publication that this was “far fewer” than the hundreds of thousands of chips being purchased by competitors like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta.