Zombie AI Siri Could Make Its Way to iPhones Two Years After Initial Announcement

At this week’s WWDC 2025 keynote, Apple’s senior vice president of software, Craig Federighi, strutted up on stage to the sound of Ratt’s “Round and Round” playing in the background. “Love’ll will find a way, just give it time… What goes around, comes around,” Stephen Pearcy belted out as Federighi, in his brilliant white mane, stood tall under the spotlight. He immediately went into all the updates that came to Apple Intelligence in 2024 and 2025. But one thing was missing, and Apple knew we were all thinking about it.

“We’re continuing to do the work to make Siri even more personal,” Federighi said. “This work needed more time to meet our high quality bar, and we’re excited to tell you more about it in the coming year.”

Apple may tell us more about its delayed AI Siri in 2025, but according to the latest rumors, we may not actually see it until spring 2026. Bloomberg’s Apple rumormonger Mark Gurman reported, based on a usual slate of anonymous sources, that the tech giant will offer a personalized, conversational Siri as part of the iOS 26.4 update. If Apple hits the spring 2026 target, that will be close to two full years after Apple first said it was coming at WWDC 2024.

For its part, Apple told Bloomberg that some AI upgrades are coming this year. Gurman suggests Apple could share an AI Siri beta sometime in the fall if it meets the company’s “high quality bar.” In the meantime, it’s hoping to tide consumers over with the iOS 26 “Liquid Glass” redesign and Visual Intelligence—which lets users ask ChatGPT questions about what’s on your screen.

At that point, we’ll have already experienced two whole cycles of Google’s increasingly AI-filled Android OS on smartphones. Gemini has long ago overtaken Google Assistant as the phone’s default chatbot. At last month’s Google I/O, the Alphabet-owned company took its AI integration a step further by suggesting people would want to pay for a $250 AI subscription bundle that includes full access to the most advanced version of Gemini along with other perks like NotebookLM and access to its Veo3 model through the Flow filmmaking tool.

Compared to the competition, Apple’s AI features seem like small fish in a deep and ever-widening pond. Apple is juggling two sides of its business. Sales analysis shows consumers are largely ambivalent about AI features on phones, and neither Google nor Apple has sold that many more phones because of AI alone. At the same time, investors want Apple to compete in AI with the rest of big tech, damn the consequences and the users who would prefer to not use a chatbot for everything.

Apple isn’t its usual stoic self in the wake of the Apple Intelligence delay. Gurman reported that, internally, the engineering side of the company is arguing with the marketing end about who oversold whom. Apple is still working on its own large language models—the underlying AI that powers chatbots like ChatGPT. It’s at this point we would hope Apple would try for something truly unique, rather than following in the footsteps of other tech giants. We may not be nearly as enthusiastic about AI-enhanced Siri as much as we just want an assistant that can tell us the weather and check emails without a host of issues cropping up. The best way to smooth over the wrinkles with annoyed Apple fans could be as simple as releasing that Pixar-inspired, AI-powered lamp. At least that will be something we haven’t seen before.