Apple isn’t planning to use June’s WWDC 2025 event to detail its ongoing and heavily-delayed efforts to turn Siri into an assistant able to compete with the big players in generative AI.
That’s according to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman who reckons Apple will gloss over the issue amid public struggles to get back on track with Siri’s AI revolution. Gurman says Apple is unlikely to spend much time talking about Siri at all during the keynote address.
“Significant upgrades to Siri—including the ones promised nearly a year ago—are unlikely to be discussed much and are still months away from shipping,” Gurman writes.
This isn’t all that shocking considering the last few months where Apple was forced into an embarrassing admission the features announced almost a year ago were not ready for prime time and wouldn’t be until the end of this year at the earliest.
However, the quiet shouldn’t be confused with inaction, according to the report. The in-depth piece also says the company is getting its head around what needs to be done to rectify the Apple Intelligence rollout that has damaged the brand’s reputation globally.
Apple is now rebuilding its assistant from the ground up with “LLM Siri” – as it’s called internally – better equipped to be a direct competitor to the likes of ChatGPT and Google Gemini. It’ll retool the assistant and get around some of the engineering woes that restricted Siri’s adaption to the GenAI era, the report adds:
“The Apple sources say the company, despite its hopes for LLM Siri, is also preparing to separate the Apple Intelligence brand from Siri in its marketing. It’s a tacit admission that the voice assistant’s poor reputation isn’t helping the company’s AI messaging. “
Furthermore, Apple believes it’s onto a winner in catching up with the likes of ChatGPT, with executives believing Apple’s own chatbot can now take on OpenAI’s market-leading, according to unnamed employees at Apple cited in the piece.
The report adds: “According to employees, the chatbot the company has been testing internally has made significant strides over the past six months, to the point that some executives see it as on par with recent versions of ChatGPT.”
Elsewhere at WWDC, Apple is expected to reveal iOS 19 – a reimagined version of the software to power the best iPhone models.
Opinion
It’s no exaggeration to say Apple’s future at the top of the tech tree relies on its ability to get generative AI right.
The company is currently paying for its slow start, but there’s still time to get it right.
Apple usually enters markets long after the early adopters and when the tools are ready to become every day items in a mainstream sense. We still have a while before that’s the case, but time is running out.
