In an interview with Tom’s Guide, Apple execs Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak talked about the delay of the much-anticipated “personalized Siri.”
On March 7 Apple announced that it was delaying the anticipated Siri update with more specialized features until 2026.
In a statement to Daring Fireball, Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy had this to say: ““Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
Many folks have been wondering what the reasons behind the delay are.
“We found that when we were developing this feature that we had, really, two phases, two versions of the ultimate architecture that we were going to create,” Federighi told Tom’s Guide. “Version one we had working here at the time that we were getting close to the conference, and had, at the time, high confidence that we could deliver it. We thought by December, and if not, we figured by spring, until we announced it as part of WWDC. Because we knew the world wanted a really complete picture of, ‘What’s Apple thinking about the implications of Apple intelligence and where is it going?'”
What few people knew was that Apple was simultaneously working on two versions of underlying Siri architecture. V1 was used to build the initial Siri demos. But V2 was needed to deliver a complete solution to customers.
“We set about for months, making it work better and better across more app intents, better and better for doing search,” said Federighi. “But fundamentally, we found that the limitations of the V1 architecture weren’t getting us to the quality level that we knew our customers needed and expected. We realized that V1 architecture, we could push and push and put in more time, but if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards, and that we had to move to the V2 architecture. As soon as we realized that, and that was during the spring, we let the world know that we weren’t going to be able to put that out, and we were going to keep working on really shifting to the new architecture and releasing something.”
With all the hoopla over the delay, Apple isn’t offering a date when the next generation of Sir might arrive.
“Apple’s job is to figure out the right experiences that make sense in the context of what we offer to customers and to make that technology,” said Joswiak. “The features that you’re seeing in Apple Intelligence isn’t a destination for us. There’s no app on intelligence. [It’s about] making all the things you do every day better.”
