In just a few months, we should hopefully get our first look at an all-new AI-powered Siri. After revealing it more than a year and a half ago, Apple’s vision for an all-new Siri has faced numerous engineering challenges — and has yet to reach users’ devices. But that should change soon.
Siri upgrades coming soon
At WWDC 2024, Apple revealed three key upgrades for Siri with Apple Intelligence:
- Personal context: When you talk to Siri, it will have the context of the information on your device, saving you the need to know exactly where to find something
- On-screen awareness: Siri will be able to see your screen while you make a request, allowing you to be less descriptive
- Take action in apps: Rather than having to open an app for every mundane action, you’ll be able to ask Siri to perform 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.
For now, Apple plans to use Google Gemini to drive these features, rather than in-device models. If they move forward with Gemini, it will use Private Cloud Compute, so Google still won’t get data from these queries.
Macworld’s Filipe Esposito recently reported that new Siri features are on track to launch with iOS 26.4, according to discovered Apple code.
AI search engine
Aside from these already-revealed Siri features, Apple has a new feature in the works: its own generative AI search engine. We first heard about this company back in August. According to a recent report from Mark Gurman, it could debut as early as March, which would put it in line with the release of iOS 26.4:
Apple used this opportunity to rebuild the assistant to create a new search product – internally dubbed World Knowledge Answers, or WKA – to compete with Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This feature is also planned for March as part of the new Siri, and it could eventually come to the Safari browser and Spotlight search tool.
Release date
Although we don’t know for sure when iOS 26.4 will debut, but if one has to go by history, it will probably be in March or April. This also means that we will see the first beta as early as next month. We could potentially get our first look at the all-new Siri in less than 6 weeks.
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