In recent weeks, Apple has been unable to escape headlines about its slow progress with everything having to do with Siri and artificial intelligence. The company has officially delayed features first promised last June intended to modernize Siri and give Apple a much-needed boost in the AI race. We still don’t know when those Apple Intelligence capabilities will arrive, and if a recent all-hands meeting is anything to go by, neither does Apple itself.
Bloomberg has the full scoop on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by senior director Robby Walker, who oversees the division. He called the delay an “ugly” situation and sympathized with employees who might be feeling burned out or frustrated by Apple’s decisions. He also reportedly said it’s not a given that the missing Siri features will make it into iOS 19 this year; that’s the company’s current target, but “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” he told employees.
“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker said, according to Bloomberg’s report. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.”
The meeting also hinted at tension between Apple’s Siri unit and the marketing division. Walker said the communications team wanted to highlight features like Siri understanding personal context and being able to take action based on what’s currently on a user’s screen — even though they were nowhere near ready. Those WWDC teases and the resulting customer expectations only made matters worse, Walker acknowledged. Apple has since pulled an iPhone 16 ad that showcased the features and has added disclaimers to several areas of its website noting they’ve all been punted to a TBD date.
Apple has not publicly commented on the situation beyond last week’s statement, when it said the advanced Siri capabilities were “taking longer than expected.” But Walker told his staff that senior executives like software chief Craig Federighi and AI boss John Giannandrea are taking “intense personal accountability” for a predicament that’s drawing fierce criticism as the months pass by with little to show for it beyond a prettier Siri animation.
“Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” Walker said. “We’re going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.”