Apple just can’t get Siri working right

Apple just can’t seem to get its new Siri off the ground. A new report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg says that testing of the big Siri overhaul due in iOS 26.4 (soon to enter beta, with a release planned for March) will instead be spread out over the rest of the year. At this point, it’s hard to have confidence that important planned features won’t be delayed further.

Gurman’s sources tell him that testing has “run into snags in recent weeks” and that some of the features will be delayed to iOS 26.5 (due in May) or iOS 27 (due in September).

To recap the timeline: Apple announced iOS 18 at WWDC in June of 2024, promoting three major new Siri enhancements: the creation of a personal profile that uses personalized data to add context to queries, the ability to understand what is on the screen at the moment, and the ability to perform many actions across both Apple and third-party apps.

The company even ran TV ads promoting these features in advance of the iPhone 16 release. But the software wasn’t ready, and got bumped back to a spring release, targeting iOS 18.4. Apple then missed that window, pushing the features back to an unspecified future date that inside sources revealed to be iOS 27. The latest update targeted iOS 26.4, due for release next month.

Apple was set to release a new Siri built using foundation technology from Google’s Gemini, which would include the features promised in 2024. It would also introduce an even smarter and more capable Siri, with a more powerful Gemini-based foundation, as a complete conversational chatbot in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27 this fall.

Now, it looks like iOS 26.4 might get some of the new features, with some others pushed back into iOS 26.5 and even iOS 27. The Siri update planned for next month “doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests,” according to Gurman’s sources.

The situation remains fluid and can change, but the “personal context” feature seems especially likely to slip. It would have allowed you to make a requests like “play that podcast Mike was telling me about last month” and it would search Messages for the appropriate conversation and play the linked podcast. You could say “what time does mom’s flight get in?” and it would know who your mother is from your Contacts and Messages, find the recent flight info in your Messages or Mail, and look up the current flight info.

Engineers working on iOS 26.5 now have a settings toggle to enable a “preview” of that personal context functionality, according to the report. Also being tested in iOS 26.5 is the system of expanded app intents for performing in-app actions, but “they don’t function reliably in all cases.”

There are general problems, too. The new Siri apparently has a bug that cuts people off when they’re speaking too quickly, and has trouble with accuracy and long processing times for more complex queries. Oh, and Siri sometimes falls back on the existing ChatGPT integration even when it’s something that Siri should be able to answer.

Apple is said to be testing a couple of new features as part of iOS 26.5: a new custom image generator and a web search tool. The image generator uses the same foundation as Apple’s Image Playground feature, which is currently far behind competitors. The web search tool performs much like Perplexity or Google’s AI web search feature: it finds what you want on the web and provides a synthesized summary.

It all seems to be going rather poorly at the moment, with some features sure to slip further and even those that aren’t not quite working as well as we would all like. Don’t be surprised if Apple turns the new Siri into a sort of opt-in “beta” to save face.