Hey Siri, Why Is Your Big Update Delayed?

Poor Siri. First, they got upstaged by ChatGPT, a very different type of whiz-bang futuristic disembodied voice, and then they had some of the shine taken off their apple when Apple Intelligence debuted last October.

Now Siri’s big comeback tour has been delayed because the host of major new features are not working out as planned. Among the tweaks to make Siri smarter are granting it the ability to remember context from previous discussions and enabling an on-screen awareness that takes into account what you’re looking at when tailoring answers and actions.

Rather than make its debut in April’s iOS 18.4 as planned, the update has been postponed to sometime later this year.

what’s going wrong?

Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy told Daring Fireball last Friday, “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.”

Standard PR approach. Soften them up with some boilerplate fawning over the product in question, and then slip in a smoothed-over admission of a lack of forward momentum. But it doesn’t answer much.

When, precisely, is “in the coming year?” What does “rolling them out” entail? Beyond knowing now that Siri’s upgrades will come out episodically, rather than all in one update, we don’t know in which regions that’ll happen first, which upgraded features will release first, or any other details about how the rollout will happen. And from the sound of it, neither does Apple.

Why is Siri’s Update Delayed?

Bloomberg’s Apple whisperer, Mark Gurman, reported late last week that “in the lead-up to the latest delay, software chief Craig Federighi and other executives voiced strong concerns internally that the features didn’t work properly—or as advertised—in their personal testing,” according to Gurman’s internal source who didn’t want to be identified.

“Apple engineers have been racing to fix a rash of bugs in the project,” wrote Gurman. “The work has been unsuccessful, according to people involved in the efforts, and they now believe the features won’t be released until next year at the earliest.”

We don’t know precisely what issues have been holding Siri back. All we can do is root for Siri from the sidelines. Having been upstaged by the generative AI craze of the past two years, Siri’s comeback tour will take a little longer than thought. Or a lot longer.

Who knows. Apple sure doesn’t. When I asked Siri themselves, “Hey Siri, why is your big update delayed,” they punted and simply referred me to a three-result web search that ushered me toward Reddit, Quora, and YouTube, regarding two video games and a generic internet browser problem. The new Siri would never do this. I think.