Apple’s promised Siri overhaul likely won’t be fully realized until 2026.
A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple is working on a Siri LLM to compete with ChatGPT. But it won't be ready until the iOS 19 and macOS 16 software updates, likely announced in 2025 and released in spring 2026.
The tech giant has been scrambling to update its dated voice assistant in the generative AI era, which has seen the rise of ChatGPT and competitors like Google Gemini.
Apple announced a slew of new AI features as part of Apple Intelligence at WWDC last spring, including an updated Siri. But, "the company has yet to truly overhaul the software," said Gurman, adding "the upgrades that accompanied Apple Intelligence were mostly cosmetic."
So far, these have been part of iOS 18 updates, including a new glowing interface, the ability to type to Siri, and forthcoming integration with user data to perform personalized tasks based on emails, calendar events, and messages.
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The project, internally dubbed "LLM Siri" will reportedly rebuild Siri from the ground up, as an LLM (Large Language Model) that is trained on mass corpora of data. A Siri trained on advanced Apple AI models will "allow for back-and-forth conversations" and "interact more like a human and handle tasks in a way that’s closer to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini," said Gurman.
Even though Apple is developing its own Siri LLM, the company has partnered with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to iPhones as a third party tool with the iOS 18.2 update in December. Apple has also shared plans to partner with Google to provide Gemini as an alternative chatbot. The idea is to give Apple users a buffet of choices depending on the chatbot's specialities and offerings. On a related note, Apple is touting Apple Intelligence as privacy-minded, running tasks on-device and asking users if they want to proceed with a third-party option.
iOS 18.2 will be the biggest update so far, since it will include ChatGPT features that work with Siri, and other Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji and Image Playground. So for now, Apple is relying on OpenAI's chatbot to handle some of the more advanced generative AI tasks. The iOS 18.2 update is expected within the first two weeks of December.
