Apple has not confirmed if its delayed personalized Siri features were anything more than conceptual when they were announced during the WWDC 2024 keynote last year, but they reportedly exist internally in at least a semi-usable way by now.
Apple's senior director of Siri, Robby Walker, demonstrated at least some of the personalized Siri features in a "working" state during a recent all-hands meeting with the Siri team, according to a report yesterday from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman:
He showed examples during the meeting of the technology working: It was able to locate his driver's license number on command and find specific photos of a child. He also demonstrated how the technology could precisely manipulate apps via voice control. It embedded content in an email, added recipients and made other changes.
The above paragraph in the report was highlighted by Daring Fireball's John Gruber.
While it may sound obvious that at least some of the features are now functional within Apple, this was not entirely clear, as the company has not shown any public demos of the features being in a working state. Apple now faces the task of ensuring that the features not only work, but work well, before making them available to customers. Walker reportedly said the features were only working "up to two-thirds to 80% of the time."
Apple said it anticipates rolling out the personalized Siri features "in the coming year," but it did not provide a more specific timeframe.
Whenever they launch, the Siri upgrades will include understanding of a user's personal context, on-screen awareness, and deeper per-app controls. For example, during its WWDC 2024 keynote, Apple showed an iPhone user asking Siri about their mother's flight and lunch reservation plans based on info from the Mail and Messages apps.
Apple added fine print to its iPhone 16 product pages that says the features are "in development":
Siri's personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions are in development and will be available with a future software update.
Gurman said the features currently "aren't expected until next year at the earliest," and recent reports from Reuters and CNBC have also mentioned a 2026 timeframe. If so, that means the Siri upgrades are unlikely to launch until iOS 19.4 or later.
