Apple has finally set a date for the long-awaited overhaul of its voice assistant. Engineering teams are now aiming to ship the upgraded Siri in iOS 26.4, a mid-cycle update that typically arrives in March, placing the public debut in spring 2026.
Apple introduced the AI-powered Siri features at WWDC 2024 and initially hinted they would land in 2025. That timeline collapsed after the first internal builds failed to meet Apple’s reliability bar.
“The experience didn’t converge in the way, quality-wise, that we needed it to,” software chief Craig Federighi admitted in a post-keynote interview, confirming that the latest Siri features will indeed be pushed to 2026. Marketing head Greg Joswiak added that shipping something half-baked “would have been more disappointing to customers than taking extra time.”
However, shortly after Federighi’s confirmation, a more specific launch date has emerged. The new launch date is an internal target as reported by Bloomberg after several others have been missed. The features were originally planned for fall 2024, eventually being pushed to early 2025, then May, and now March 2026.
One reason could be the ambitions Apple has behind the new version of Siri. The new version promises deeper on-device intelligence, letting Siri do some impressive tasks it couldn’t before:
- On-screen awareness: Siri will be able to see the current app, webpage, or document and use that context in a follow-up question.
- Personal context: It can pull details from your calendar, messages, and email to answer queries or draft actions.
- Action chains: Instead of one-shot commands (“Set a reminder”), you’ll be able to ask for multi-step tasks such as “Email this PDF to my team and add it to Monday’s agenda.”
- Third-party hooks: Apple plans to give developers an “actions” API so their apps can plug into Siri’s new brain.
The Bigger Picture
Apple frames the delay as a quality decision, but it also leaves the company playing catch-up while Google, Microsoft, and Amazon race ahead with generative AI assistants. The 2026 target means at least one more iPhone generation will launch with only incremental Siri changes, not the full reinvention Apple previewed on stage.
Developers should see an early Siri SDK at WWDC 2026 so they can wire these new “actions” into their apps. Public beta testers are likely to get hands-on time later that year, just before the iOS 26.4 rollout in March 2026. Until then, iPhone owners will have to settle for smaller Apple Intelligence perks arriving in iOS 26 this fall while Apple quietly rebuilds Siri into the assistant it always promised to be.