Siri’s Delay: An Artifact of Apple’s Hesitant AI Footing

Siri’s Delayed AI Update Reflects Apple’s Uncertain Footing

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My initial excitement about Siri wasn’t connected to Apple or the iPhone. Back in February 2010, Siri was a standalone iPhone app promised by a startup, which was born from SRI, a Silicon Valley R&D icon known for its collaboration with DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense’s research arm. Apple acquired Siri three months later, integrating it into iOS a year and a half after that, starting with a beta version on the iPhone 4s.

I found that exciting, describing it as “breathtaking for a beta.” I added, “If voice-activated assistants are all around us in five or ten years, we’ll look back and say it all started here.” It turned out to be true.

But, Siri’s reputation began to wane before its fifth birthday. Early analyses called it a disappointment, often expressing the hope that Apple would transform it with a significant upgrade. Over time, the topic generated enormous commentary.

More than fifteen years after my first experience with Siri, the long-awaited, transformative update is still missing. The update, which was previewed last June as part of “Apple Intelligence” during its WWDC keynote, promised a more “natural, relevant, and personal” version. However, it has yet to be released. On Friday, Apple announced that the update was taking “longer than we thought,” and the release has been pushed back to sometime in “the coming year.” A reasonable guess is that it will arrive with iOS 19 and MacOS 16, expected this fall.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has offered an extensive and critical account of the delay and its implications. In essence, Apple seems to have repeatedly showcased features far from completion, even failing to get them ready for live demos. Ultimately, the company acknowledged it was over its head, a fact it hasn’t clarified – and won’t – and postponed the release indefinitely.

Such products are commonly referred to as vaporware. The tech industry has numerous examples of this. Apple, in its modern history, has been notably disciplined about avoiding vaporware, which makes this situation even more striking.

It’s understandable that Apple might have aimed for an upgrade more ambitious than it could swiftly achieve. The new Siri is designed to handle free-form requests such as “Send Erica the photos from Saturday’s barbecue,” a significant leap from the assistant’s history of understanding only a limited set of precisely expressed instructions. In addition to needing improved language skills, the new Siri will need to analyze your email, calendar, contacts, notes, photos, and other device-stored information in unprecedented ways.

This marks Apple’s most intriguing and ambitious use of AI. It’s literally something only Apple could do, as no other company has enough access to iOS to consider building it. However, as my colleague Jared Newman explained last June, it also had the potential to make third-party apps much more Siri-friendly than before.

But despite all the potential, the new Siri seems like something Apple was rushing to release as evidence it wasn’t falling behind in AI. The generative AI boom, which started over two years ago with ChatGPT, has put the company into a reactive mode, where it’s playing catch-up in areas like image generation. A significantly improved Siri could have placed Apple ahead of the curve. While that may still happen, the delay only makes the company look like it doesn’t fully grasp AI and how to capitalize on it in Apple products.

I also suspect that Apple’s failure to launch the new Siri isn’t solely due to the difficulties of making AI useful, reliable, and safe. It reflects the larger, long-standing narrative of Siri being full of promise but only sporadically living up to it. I think two other specific factors are at play.

Factor 1: Overwhelmed by Updates

Apple may be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of software updates it tries to release each year. Before the iPhone, the company only had one operating system, MacOS (then known as OS X), and didn’t adhere to a fixed update schedule. Now, with a yearly schedule, it must handle upgrades for MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, tvOS, and VisionOS. It’s a demanding schedule. Consequently, inadequate resource allocation for certain elements is unsurprising. In my experience, for instance, my beloved iPad often feels neglected from a software perspective. And Apple TV, theoretically a core Apple product in the streaming age, remains a relatively unchanged hobby.

Artificial intelligence should be one area Apple can’t afford to deprioritize, but it’s also among the most demanding ones. The company may not have had enough resources to adequately focus on Siri, even after highlighting the new version during its WWDC and iPhone 16 keynotes.

Factor 2: Apple’s Emotional Distance from Siri

At some level I don’t quite understand, Apple may never quite have emotionally bonded with Siri. How else to explain the company’s failure to do all that much with it over all these years?

Acquiring Siri in 2010 was forward-thinking, as was integrating it into the iPhone. A more ambitious approach to the feature could have transformed iOS. Apple might have been known as an AI leader. But perhaps Siri moved the company out of its comfort zone that was built around polished visuals, touch input, consistent experiences, and other elements that made the iPhone a landmark achievement.

Presenting Siri as being in “a new era,” showcasing it in pre-recorded presentations, and then delaying its release is one of the more embarrassing situations Apple has created for itself in recent years. Despite that, I believe the delay was a reasonable decision. The quality of Siri is more important than its timely release. Given that we’ve been waiting for it to be great since 2011, we can certainly wait a little longer.

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