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Apple Intelligence is gaining features apace, but there’s one that was announced last June and expected in April this year—an enhanced Siri with greater personalization and the capability to do a lot more. Apple announced Friday, March 7 that it’s not coming soon.
Apple iPhone 16e: smarter Siri is officially delayed.
In a statement to John Gruber at Daring Fireball, Apple said that it’s taken longer than expected to finesse this and so it’s delaying it, with the new timeline given only as “in the coming year.”
“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,” the full statement reads.
It’s not quite unprecedented for Apple to announce a delay like this, but it’s definitely a rare occurrence.
Apple is not precise about when it will be—in the coming year could mean right up to March 2026. It seems clear that it’s highly unlikely that it will form part of iOS 18, but rather will be included in iOS 19, which we’ll see the first glimpses of at WWDC in June.
Since the new Siri was a marquee feature in the iOS 18 reveal last year, this will disappoint many but, as Gruber says, Apple has made the announcement to show it’s getting on top of stuff and is now managing expectations about when it will launch.
Personal context is one new Siri element that’s been much-anticipated because it will mean Siri can use its knowledge of your emails, texts, photos and more to enable it to do a lot to help. My favorite example Apple gave was being able to ask, “What’s my passport number?”
Other features include Siri being able to do more in apps than before. As the statement says, plenty of new Siri features have already arrived, but there’s a lot more to come, and now a longer wait.
