In just a few short months, we should hopefully get our first look at an all new AI-infused Siri. After unveiling it over a year and a half ago, Apple’s vision for an all new Siri faced many engineering challenges – and is yet to hit users devices. That should be changing soon, though.
Siri upgrades coming soon
At WWDC 2024, Apple unveiled three key upgrades for Siri with Apple Intelligence:
- Personal context: When talking to Siri, it’ll have context of the information on your device, preventing you from needing to know exactly where to find something
- On screen awareness: Siri will be able to see your screen while you’re making a request, allowing you to be less descriptive
- Taking action in apps: Rather than needing to open an app for every mundane action, you’ll be able to ask Siri to complete tasks for you
Initially, these new Siri upgrades were supposed to debut in iOS 18.4. However, Apple ran into technical hurdles with the Siri engineering stack, and ended up delaying it while they rewrote Siri from the ground-up on a new LLM based infrastructure.
At the moment, Apple is considering using Google Gemini to power these features, rather than on-device models. If they go forward with Gemini, it’ll utilize Private Cloud Compute, so Google still won’t get data from these queries.
Macworld’s Filipe Esposito recently reported that new Siri features are in fact on track to launch with iOS 26.4, according to uncovered Apple code.
AI search engine
Outside of these already unveiled Siri features, Apple has a new feature in the pipeline: its own generative AI search engine. We first heard about this undertaking in August. According to a recent report from Mark Gurman, it may debut as soon as March, which would put it in line with the release of iOS 26.4:
Apple has used this opportunity to rebuild the assistant to create a new search product — internally dubbed World Knowledge Answers, or WKA — in order to compete with the likes of Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. That feature is also scheduled for March as part of the new Siri, and it may eventually make its way into the Safari browser and Spotlight search tool as well.
Release date
While we don’t know for certain when iOS 26.4 will debut, but if history is to be followed, it’ll likely be in March or April. That also means that we’ll see the first beta debut as soon as next month. We could potentially get our first look at the all new Siri in under 6 weeks.
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