Apple just can’t get Siri to work properly

Apple just can’t get its new Siri off the ground. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says testing of the big Siri overhaul that’s supposed to be in iOS 26.4 (soon to enter beta, with a March release) will instead be spread out over the rest of the year. At this time, it is difficult to be sure that important planned features will not be further delayed.

Gurman’s sources told him that testing has “run into problems in recent weeks” and that some 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 2024 and touted three major new improvements to Siri: the creation of a personal profile that uses personalized data to add context to questions, the ability to understand what’s currently on the screen, and the ability to perform many actions in both Apple and third-party apps.

The company even ran TV ads promoting these features ahead of the release of the iPhone 16. But the software wasn’t ready and was pushed back to a spring release focused on iOS 18.4. Apple then skipped that window and pushed the features back to an unspecified future date, which inside sources revealed was iOS 27. The latest update focused on iOS 26.4, which is due out next month.

Apple was poised to release a new Siri built using core technology from Google’s Gemini, which would include features promised in 2024. This fall, it would also introduce an even smarter and more capable Siri with a more powerful foundation based on Gemini as a full conversational chatbot on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27.

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

The situation remains fluid and subject to change, but the “personal context” feature seems particularly likely to slip. It would allow you to enter requests like “play that podcast Mike told me about last month” and it would search the messages for the appropriate conversation and play the linked podcast. You could say “what time is mom’s flight?” and it would know who your mother is from your contacts and messages, find recent flight information in news or mail, and look up current flight information.

Engineers working on iOS 26.5 now have a settings toggle that allows a “preview” of this personal context feature, according to the report. iOS 26.5 also tests a system of extended app intents for performing in-app actions, but they “do not work reliably in all cases.”

There are also general problems. The new Siri apparently has a bug that cuts people off when they speak too fast, and has problems with accuracy and long processing times for more complex queries. Oh, and Siri will sometimes revert to the existing ChatGPT integration, although that’s something Siri should be able to answer.

Apple is reportedly testing several 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 the competition. The web search tool works much like Perplexity or Google’s AI web search feature: it finds what you want on the web and provides a synthesized summary.

Everything seems to be going pretty bad at the moment, some features are sure to slip further and even those that don’t work as well as we all would like. Don’t be surprised if Apple turns the new Siri into a face-saving “beta” of sorts.