A few weeks ago, Apple announced that it had inked a deal with Google to fix Siri. Or to put it more accurately, Apple will rely on a custom version of Gemini to develop a new version of Siri, one that is faster, smarter, and does a lot more. As per Bloomberg, the transition was supposed to happen with the upcoming iOS 26.4 update, but those plans appear to have been delayed.
What’s happening?
“After planning to include the new capabilities in iOS 26.4 — an operating system update slated for March — Apple is now working to spread them out over future versions, according to people familiar with the matter,” says the latest report from the outlet. That means some of the planned Siri features will only be released widely in the Fall season, when iOS 27 is widely released with the iPhone 18 series.
According to the report, Apple’s engineers ran into issues where Siri didn’t respond to queries as expected, or it was just too slow. In the wake of these hiccups, Apple is now reportedly targeting iOS 26.5 to release some of the next-gen Siri features, which include advanced conversational skills, the ability to execute tasks in other apps, and pull up context from user data stored on the phone.
What’s next?
The latter, which grants Siri awareness of your personal data, such as calendar, messages, photos, and location information, is the likely candidate for a delayed release. Additionally, the ability to get work done in apps by summoning Siri using voice commands could also be delayed.
The in-development version of Siri also reportedly falls back on ChatGPT, which is already a part of Apple Intelligence, even though Apple’s own local models are capable of handling those tasks. The features that appear to be on track include the custom web search tool (aka answering engine), similar to Perplexity. An updated AI-powered image generation also appears to be on the scheduled development track.
