Apple is heavily marketing its new artificial intelligence (AI) software, Apple Intelligence, along with its iPhone 16 range of phones, but one of the promised upgrades has officially been delayed despite being previewed last year.

The tech giant has confirmed that Apple Intelligence updates to Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, won’t be released to compatible iPhones, iPads and Macs compatible as soon as previously thought.

The more personalised version of Siri that Apple showed off when it unveiled Apple Intelligence at its WWDC event in June 2024 was able to act on information shown on the user’s screen and was also able to draw personal context from across various Apple apps, making actions more flexible and accurate. The features were expected to roll out in a software update soon.

But the firm must be having issues, as Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy gave the following statement to Daring Fireball:

“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.”

While Apple had not committed to a specific date to roll out the new Siri features, it was expected in the first half of 2025, which is why it’s notable the company has had to say they will now come out “in the coming year”. That phrase seems purposefully vague, and could mean in 2025 or in the next 12 months, which would take us into 2026.

In a presentation last year, Apple demoed the new version of Siri by asking the assistant “When is Mom’s flight landing?”, with the iPhone able to cross-reference private information from emails and texts with live flight information to accurately show when that person’s mother’s flight was landing. This is a complex operation that needs to take data from several sources, and it seems the quality control folks at Apple don’t think it’s ready yet.

Apple may be exercising caution here due to Apple Intelligence’s rocky rollout. While it’s normal for software features on modern gadgets to evolve slowly, Apple Intelligence has been under the microscope for reportedly pushing false news information to users via the notification summary feature, which distills a stack of notifications from a single app into short sentences or phrases.

By delaying the rollout of the updated Siri, Apple may find itself lagging behind rivals such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, the former of which is integrated into Apple Intelligence. The latter is finding its way onto a plethora of Android phones and aims to pull in personal user data from across Google apps to perform the sort of actions Apple has promised with its AI-infused Siri.

In fairness to Apple, this sort of transparency about delays and, ultimately, quality control, is better for consumers. That said, Apple is heavily marketing its iPhone 16 line up with the promise of Apple Intelligence, and while it might not be the main driver for many Apple fans to upgrade, the tools still feel half baked.

Apple has made sure to release new versions of most of its iPad and MacBook product line to support Apple Intelligence, including the iPad mini, which runs the same A17 Pro chip as the iPhone 15 Pro, the only non-16 series iPhone to support the AI smarts. Notably, Apple just updated the base model iPad, but it cannot run Apple Intelligence as the firm opted to load it up with the older A16 chip.