Conversational "LLM Siri" might not arrive until iOS 20
Many iPhone users, including myself, have eagerly waited for the new "personal Siri" that can go through emails, texts, and other apps to find the answers to personal questions you might ask Siri to respond to. For example, you might ask Siri to tell you the date and time when your mother's plane will arrive at the airport so you can pick her up. The new "personal Siri" will look through apps for some correspondence that contains the answer and will pass it along to you.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said yesterday in his weekly Power On newsletter that this feature will be released in May, 11 months after Apple previewed it during last year's WWDC Developers Conference. Gurman says that the current version of Siri has two brains. One deals with legacy requests like making calls, and setting alarms and timers. The other brain handles advanced questions and tasks and is the one that will go through user data to respond with personal information.
Gurman says that in order to rush Apple Intelligence out in time to be included in iOS 18, Apple did not put the two "brains" together which he blames for the feature not working as smoothly as it should. The Bloomberg scribe says that a new "Siri architecture" will be displayed at this year's WWDC convention in June before getting rolled out in June 2026 as part of iOS 19.4. At that time, both of Siri's brains should be merged into one bigger brain and this will result in a smoother-running Siri.
But one new Siri capability, Large Language Model Siri (known around Cupertino as "LLM Siri" for short) will not be available until iOS 20 in 2027! This is the version of Siri that is more conversational and gives Siri many of the features that we like to see in AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini to name a couple. And this leaves Apple way behind in AI. Even Amazon, with the unveiling of its Alexa+ last week, has moved far ahead of Apple in this field.
Siri asks if you want it to use ChatGPT to answer some queries. | Image credit-PhoneArena
Remember the awe you felt when Apple introduced Siri with the iPhone 4s in 2011? Remember how cool you thought this technology was when you saw Siri in use for the first time? Apple clearly had an opportunity that it let slip away.
Part of the problem is that Apple has had some key employees poached and some supplies, like AI accelerators made by Nvidia, are getting hard to find. Heck, even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the other day that his company had run out of GPUs. Gurman says that Apple's more than capable chip team is working on "solutions" which we take to mean that Apple is in the process of developing its own AI accelerator chip.
For now, you can follow my game plan as long as you don't mind installing beta versions of iOS. I plan to continue installing each new beta release hoping that some of them will include new Siri features. I do this so I can show you any new changes when they occur. You can do this to be first on your block and thus impress your friends and family by having "personal Siri" and eventually "LLM Siri" on your iPhone. One warning: you might have to deal with the unstable nature of beta releases until stable iOS 20 is released in September 2027 so back up your iPhone first.
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