An updated AI-based Siri was promised last year but has been delayed for months. After WWDC 2025, it was still unclear when the overhauled Siri would launch.
Now, a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman claims that Apple is targeting Spring 2026 to launch the upgraded Siri. Apparently, the Siri revamp will come out as part of iOS 26.4.
If Apple keeps a similar schedule as iOS 18, that means we could see the public version of iOS 26.4 release at the end of March in 2026. The beta version will likely be available a few weeks before.
During WWDC 2025, Tom's Guide global editor in chief Mark Spoonauer was able to sit down with Apple's Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak and discuss the Siri delay.
After some internal shuffling, Federighi has reportedly taken over development of Siri.
When Apple Intelligence was introduced at WWDC 2024, Siri was supposed to get a number of enhancements, including more conversational experiences and contextual responses.
According to Federighi, the company was working on two versions of Siri and found that at least one of the versions wasn't ready, while needing to upgrade the architecture.
"We found that the limitations of the V1 architecture weren't getting us to the quality level that we knew our customers needed and expected...if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards and we had to move to the V2 architecture," he said.
We found that the limitations of the V1 architecture weren't getting us to the quality level that we knew our customers needed and expected...if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards and we had to move to the V2 architecture.
Craig Federighi, Apple
The problems with the two versions and the need to shift to a new "architecture" caused Apple to officially announce that Siri was delayed in March of this year, something the company rarely does.
During the talk at WWDC 2025, Apple was mum on a release date.
"We will announce the date when we're ready to seed it, and you're all ready to be able to experience it,” said Federighi.
In the meantime, Apple has opened up its large language models to third-party developers. Previous reports have said that the company has also let its engineers tap into non-Apple AI models to help them improve Apple Intelligence and Siri.
It's unclear whether Siri will become a chatbot, akin to Google Gemini or OpenAI's ChatGPT. Apple is saying that it doesn't want to build a chatbot and wants to "meet people where they are" with AI.
Apple has openly struggled with Siri, and there's no guarantee that development doesn't hit snags over the next few months.
Still, Siri appears to be in capable hands under Federighi's leadership, so we expect it will likely hit its internal deadlines for a spring launch.
Between now and spring
For now, Apple appears set on improving the Apple Intelligence features that are already available, like Visual Intelligence, while providing new ones that should make an impact across its suite of software including iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 Tahoe and even the Apple Watch with watchOS 26 and the new Workout Buddy feature.
According to Gurman, if things go well, a preview might appear later this fall around the time that the iPhone 17 is launched.
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