Apple has made a rare admission of a delay to one of its products, namely the “more personalised” Siri voice assistant.

In a statement given to an Apple-focused website called Daring Fireball, Apple said that while it added new features to Siri, improvements are “going to take us longer than we thought to deliver” and “we anticipate rolling out in the coming year”.

Apple had introduced some new Siri features with iOS 18, the current version of its mobile operating system, which rely on a first-generation Apple LLM. It allowed for certain AI functions, such as asking Siri to rewrite emails or summarise a cluttered email inbox.

Siri upgrade delayed

Apple did not give a reason for the delay for the “more personalised” Siri until 2026, but Reuters noted the firm had previously indicated the Siri improvements would come in 2025.

The Siri improvements are said to include personal context, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions. Apple has reportedly said Siri fields 1.5 billion user requests per day.

“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.”

Earlier this week Bloomberg’s noted Apple leaker Mark Gruman had reported that Apple was delaying Siri upgrade amid escalating AI concerns.

It reported that while developing new Siri features for iOS 18, Apple didn’t have the time to create one unified back-end for handling all Siri requests. As a result, there are said to be two systems, one for legacy commands, and one for more advanced ones, which complicates development.

Last November it was reported that Apple was testing a version of Siri based on large language model (LLM) technology that it may release to consumers as early as spring 2026.

Rival progress

The delays for improving Siri comes as Apple contends with its rivals already delivering AI improvements to their voice assistants.

For example Alphabet’s Google added its Gemini model to its assistant in 2024.

And last month Amazon finally unveiled its long-touted AI overhaul of Alexa (called Alexa+), which it promised is “a smarter, more conversational, and more capable voice assistant.”

Amazon opted to make Alexa+ free for all Prime members, which is a remarkable act that potentially opens the voice assistant to a much wider audience (Amazon currently has 200 million Prime customers worldwide).

For non-Prime members, Alexa+ will cost $19.99 per month.