WWDC: Yes but Siri will get smart one day, but not today
At the edge of WWDC 2025 Apple confessed that it doesn’t now expect the long-awaited contextually-aware Siri to ship before next year. It’s a shame, and a bit of a risk for the company, but almost certainly not a terminal error.
The task of teasing out this information went to Apple’s marketing chief, Greg Joswiak, who nudged the new nugget out during interviews across conference week.
We got issues
Apple said there were quality issues with the software, and that it wanted to resolve those rather than introduce a product that doesn’t quite work well enough to customers. It had originally intended to release these features with iOS 18.4, but development failed to reach the mark.
A subsequent Bloomberg report tells us that if work on these features goes well, then we may get a preview of the new tools when Apple introduced new iPhones later this year, but it won’t provide any such glimpse if it isn’t certain it can ship.
There were some hints of how it might work. Visual Intelligence, for example, now understands what is on screen, lets you ask questions about it, and lets you search for items or take other actions. You can access visual intelligence for what’s on screen by pressing the same buttons used to take a screenshot, you can then use it like a screenshot or explore more with visual intelligence.
“Users can ask ChatGPT questions about what they’re looking at on their screen to learn more, as well as search Google, Etsy, or other supported apps to find similar images and products. If there’s an object a user is especially interested in, like a lamp, they can highlight it to search for that specific item or similar objects online,” said Apple.
Where’sThePuckAI?
Of course, the missing link here is an AI intelligence that can identify what it is you are interested in within a specific image, which may be part of what Apple is working to build, conceivably with the kind of work on eye-responsive controls it has engaged in with visionOS.
Which kind of makes sense given that Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface seems to set the stage to new families of computing device over the next decade.
And I suppose that’s the point, really, the foundational significance of AI to Apple’s future product designs is so significant that the company likely knows it cannot ship anything unless it works as well as it must, as weak iteration now becomes a structural weakness in its hardware a few years down the line. But getting it right makes for a better future probability of success than getting it wrong.
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