Apple finally explains why AI-powered Siri has taken so long to develop

The least that can be said is that developing the new Siri has been no easy feat for Apple. Between the countless delays, certain engineers being sent on catch-up training, and competitors announcing major advances on a daily basis, it has been a real uphill battle for the Cupertino-based company.But why did designing Siri take so long? Could the Cupertino-based company simply have made several updates to its assistant to stay on schedule? Actually, no, because Apple had to overhaul Siri from A to Z.

Overhauling Siri from A to Z

At Apple’s WWDC conference, Mike Rockwell, the man in charge of the Siri overhaul, looked back on the early stages of designing Siri AI. He explained that the plan at the time was to update Siri with some AI improvements: “Last year, we had in fact built an initial version that incrementally augmented the original Siri by incorporating tool calling into it, and it worked. But we felt that it did not really deliver on the vision and experience we wanted to offer.”

Mike Rockwell then clarified: “We also had another approach, which required much deeper changes, and that was the one we chose. So we rolled things back and rebuilt Siri from the ground up, literally starting from scratch […]. From then on, it was no longer a matter of updating Siri, but of a complete reconstruction of the assistant to provide users with a version “with its own app, natively multimodal, and designed with privacy in mind,” in Mike Rockwell’s words. And as is often the case when it comes to major projects, it is preferable to call on external companies. Apple has therefore boosted Siri with the Gemini model and now harnesses NVIDIA chips through Google’s cloud.

A fresh start for a new assistant

Thanks to the overhaul of iOS 27 and the work of Apple’s teams, Siri AI now has little in common with the Siri we have known for years. It is now a matter of a true AI assistant, like ChatGPT, which can answer questions, perform actions, and understand the context of a screen. In reality, the overhaul of Siri was inevitable. Apple plans to integrate it deeply into the vast majority of its new products: iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone Ultra, camera-equipped AirPods, Apple TV 4K, and the new-generation HomePod mini, etc. Having somewhat fallen behind in artificial intelligence, Apple’s Siri overhaul needed to be substantial.

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Source: 9to5mac