- Apple has explained why Siri’s AI overhaul has taken so long
- Initially, the company built an “iterative” version on top of the existing Siri, but this did not live up to Apple’s vision
- So instead, Siri was then rebuilt from scratch
Siri’s AI overhaul is finally set to arrive later this year, long after it was originally promised – but Apple has now shed some light on what exactly took so long.
In a post-WWDC talk attended by 9to5Mac and TechRadar, Mike Rockwell — the Apple executive who took over the Siri team last year — explained that back in 2025, the company managed to build a working version of Siri AI “that was kind of incremental on top of the original Siri,” but that “we really delivered the experience that we wanted and that we didn’t feel like it was that vision.”
As a result, the team “rebuilt Siri from the ground up, literally, tore it down,” with the end result being “a profoundly more capable Siri.”
A necessary change in strategy
So, in other words, it sounds like Apple pivoted away from an initial plan to add to the existing Siri after realizing this wouldn’t cut it with expectant fans, and then began work on the long-running job of completely rebuilding its digital assistant.
Whether this is a satisfactory explanation is debatable – it could be argued that a company with as much talent and experience as Apple should have already known what it would take to build a true AI assistant, especially when there were plenty of rival models for the company to look to for inspiration.
But it might at least explain why this whole endeavor has taken so long. And while Apple’s original goal of delivering an incremental upgrade may have been short-sighted, the ultimate decision to abandon it and rebuild Siri from scratch was probably the right one, given how impressive the competition is in this space.
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