The big iOS 26 release from September didn't bring much in the way of new Apple Intelligence features, but that figures to change next year. Apple continues to work on a revamped version of its voice assistant — dubbed Siri 2.0 — that infuses more AI and context awareness into the feature. All that's supposed to happen with iOS 26.4, which is reportedly landing sometime in the spring.
If all this sounds familiar, that's because Apple was promising a smarter version of Siri when it first introduced Siri last year. But the company wound up pressing pause on that update when it realized that making Siri smarter required a lot more work than it had anticipated. Even now, reports out of Cupertino suggest that the behind-the-scenes work on Siri is not going swimmingly.
I want Siri to perform tasks across apps
I'm a big fan of cross-app actions on Samsung's Galaxy S25 devices that allow you to give the Gemini assistant on board your Samsung device a command that involves multiple apps. You could ask the assistant to look up the location of a particular business where you've got an appointment in Google Maps, add that appointment to your calendar and send a text to the person you're meeting confirming the time — that's one command covering three different tasks.
It's a pretty impressive feature, so much so that I sometimes want to drive out to Cupertino, pull up in the parking lot at Apple HQ, point at the Galaxy S25 Plus I have on hand and shout, "Be more like this!" to anyone who will listen.
And Apple's soon going to have a lot of other Android devices to emulate in this regard. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset will power many of the best Android phones coming out in the next year, and multiple improvements to the silicon's neural engine figure to drive these kinds of capabilities. If Apple has any hopes of catching up to the competition with on-device AI, some sort of cross-app action capability is a must.
I want Siri to nag me
I have a reminder set up on my phone each day to take various medications. And, should that reminder pop up when I'm in the middle of something else, I usually wind up ignoring it. If I'm lucky, I might glance down later at the recent notifications on my phone's lock screen, see the ignored reminder, mutter "oh right," and then do what I was supposed to do hours ago.
If Siri's going to be smarter and know more about me and my life, I want it to get on my case to actually do thing like take my medicine. If I get a reminder and don't log that I've taken my pills in the Health app, I want Siri to periodically spring into action and ping me until I follow through. And I imagine this kind of persistence can pay off in other scenarios, too.
I want Siri to give me smarter directions
Even though I use Maps a lot, I still have a persistent criticism of the app, one that Apple hasn't addressed for years. But a smarter Siri could be the solution to a problem that's annoyed me about the app's directions.
When I'm at home and plug in directions ahead of a long road trip, Maps confidently tells me how to get to freeway from my house. And invariably, Maps does not pick the side streets I prefer to use, instead sending me down the most straightforward — and usually traffic-packed — main roads. As a result, I usually wait until I'm on the highway before I ask Maps for directions — and I'd prefer to keep my eyes on the road at that time.
A smarter Siri would understand that I know to get to the freeway — I do live here, after all — and what I really need is directions from that point forward. So I'd hope that Siri 2.0 would either know enough about me to figure out my preferred route for getting out of town and incorporate in all future directions or be smart enough to hold off on turn-by-turn directions until I reach the freeway and head out for parts unknown.
I want Siri to provide better workout motivation
While I'm using Siri 2.0 to settle long-standing gripes about built-in iPhone apps, let's revisit a complaint I have about the Fitness app and its motivational prompts. I certainly like that the Fitness apps sends out notifications that encourage me to get moving; sometimes, that's just what I need to remember to get my steps in for the day. What I don't care for is that Fitness only seems to send out the kind of motivational messages that suggest every workout needs to end with me setting a personal best.
I am not in training for the next Olympics. I am a gentleman in my 50s, who's merely exercising in order to cheat the Reaper out of a few extra years down the line. A smarter version of Siri will recognize this fact and adjust the tone of the Fitness workout prompts accordingly.
Another thing Siri could recognize: when I'm on vacation, my activity ring spikes since I'm not at a desk eight hours or more each day. I'd like to see the Fitness app recognize that my dip in activity once I return to work is not me suddenly becoming a lazy bones and adjust how it calculates my movement trends to reflect that.
I want Siri to walk me through projects
I like to cook, and part of the fun of cooking for me is trying out new recipes. And if I've got those recipes on my iPhone, it can be a challenge to follow the steps on the screen while also chopping, dicing and slicing things. Touch screens and hands that have been working with raw poultry are a bad combination, I think you'll agree.
Ideally, Siri could step in and be my sous chef. I'd like the assistant to read the steps of a recipe to me, pausing while I complete one part and then resuming when it's time to do the next step. It could even repeat things if I didn't quite catch them the first time and remind me just how much of a particular ingredient I might need.
It doesn't have to just be cooking. Siri could also walk you through DIY projects, repair jobs and complex household chores. Even better if it could gain multimodal capabilities that allow it to see the same things you're looking at, but I figure Siri 2.0 needs to walk before it can run.
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