Perhaps Apple made a mistake when it announced all the features it was developing under its new AI-powered Apple Intelligence suite. The latest reports suggest the company rushed things in marketing and is now struggling to meet deadlines. A recent meeting of the Siri team offered more specific details about development progress, and the news isn’t encouraging for Apple fans.
One of the main AI-powered improvements showcased by Apple was a much more capable Siri assistant. Siri would now be able to understand the context of what’s happening on your screen and suggest potentially useful actions. The assistant would also receive a more conversational experience. These features, and others, were supposed to arrive during the iOS 18 lifecycle. However, as of today, it seems unlikely to happen.
Apple’s Siri team meeting reveals current status of AI-powered upgrade development
Bloomberg had access to what happened during a meeting of Apple’s Siri team. Robby Walker, senior director of the Siri development team, was at the forefront. According to the report, Walker described the delays in Siri’s AI upgrade as an “ugly” situation. Regarding a release timeline, it seems that even Apple isn’t clear yet. It’s not even guaranteed that Siri’s AI-powered updates will arrive with iOS 19. That’s the team’s current goal, but it “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” he reportedly said.
It seems that other developments have more priority. “We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker told employees. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features,” he added.
It also seems that there is some internal tension between Apple’s marketing division and the Siri development team. Walker did not like the Cupertino giant promoting advanced features whose development was in very early stages. Personal contextual recognition of on-screen content is one example of this. The executive believes that generating such high expectations made the situation worse for the team.
Meanwhile, Apple officially delayed the arrival of Siri’s AI-powered advanced capabilities. The company even removed an iPhone 16 ad focused on these features. A recent report by Mark Gurman said the delay was due to severe quality issues with the features. Apparently, they failed up to a “third of the time” during testing.
Apple has yet to offer a timeframe for the arrival of Siri’s AI upgrade. The company has only said that development is “taking longer than expected.”
Apple was overly optimistic when announcing its AI-powered suite
The initial announcement of Apple Intelligence was intended to make a splash in the industry. It wanted to give the impression that Apple wasn’t lagging behind in the AI era. However, it seems the company was overly optimistic and did not calculate the times well. It was risky to try to catch up with Google, which had already been years ahead in implementing AI on mobile devices.
Apple probably should have taken things more calmly at that WWDC. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time the Cupertino giant has been late in implementing certain technologies—hello, foldable phones. For some reason, this time they wanted to speed things up, and they are paying for it.
