I said only recently that it’s getting harder and harder to believe Apple can deliver on the new Siri. The company’s backtracking on announcements coupled to very vague statements on revised timings were certainly not making it easy to imagine that the new intelligent assistant will deliver.
I’m not yet ready to do my own U-turn on this, and my skepticism still very much remains, but there have at least been a couple of encouraging signs in the last few days …
The first was an admittedly very minimal and vague statement from CEO Tim Cook during the company’s latest earnings call.
“We’re also excited for a more personalized Siri. We’re making good progress on it. And as we’ve shared, we expect to release it next year.”
That’s not a lot to go on, but … Given that the company got itself into significant embarrassment when it promised something it was unable to deliver, the fact that Cook is even willing to state an expectation of releasing it next year is something.
It was notable that the iPhone 17 keynote was devoid of any Siri-related promises. The company clearly didn’t want to repeat the mistakes it made at the iPhone 16 event and wisely said nothing about what it would deliver or when on the Siri front. Cook now being willing to commit himself even to this limited degree does suggest the company has confidence that it will be ready to release something at least halfway decent at some point in 2026.
Second, and far more significantly, is Mark Gurman’s report that much of the new Siri experience will quietly rely on Google Gemini models.
The custom Gemini model will run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, to help fulfil user requests. Apple has promised that the new Siri will be able to answer personal questions like ‘find the book recommendation from Mom’ by hunting through data on your device and generating the appropriate response on-the-fly.
As I’ve said previously, by far my biggest reason for skepticism around the new Siri was the fact that Apple was trying to catch up with a rapidly moving target
Just think about what ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and Llama and DeepSeek will be able to do by the time new Siri launches! Think about Amazon’s new conversational Alexa, and what that will be capable of with another two years of development, using all of the data the company has amassed about the requests people are making of it.
Siri will no longer be judged against the capabilities of today’s chatbots, it will be judged against the ones we’ll have two years from now. That’s going to be a phenomenally high bar, and Apple really needs to reach it.
It now appears that rather than attempt to compete with existing AI chatbot models, Apple will instead be utilizing them. That seems to me a much more sensible approach, and greatly increases the credibility of claims that we will have a truly intelligent Siri by some point next year.
There is still a huge integration task required to ensure that Siri is fully integrated into the Apple ecosystem despite relying on third-party models. We shouldn’t underestimate the scale of that challenge, which is why I say that my skepticism remains in place for now.
But it is a dramatically smaller ask than Apple somehow catching up with existing AI models and keeping pace with their development over the next year or so. I’m not yet ready to believe, but I am now more open to the idea that the company will pull it off.
What about you? Are you more skeptical or more confident? Please take our poll and share your thoughts in the comments.
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