Siri with promised Apple Intelligence upgrades may not be fully ready until iOS 18.5

In the category of disappointing but not surprising, Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg that the upgraded version of Siri may not be fully ready for iOS 18.4 when it arrives soon.

Apple announced these three Siri upgrades at its Worldwide Developer Conference last June:

Personal Context Understanding

With the on-device semantic index provided by Apple Intelligence, Siri can understand emails, messages, photos, calendar events, files, and more. It can provide answers to questions that are personal to you. For example, when you say, “What was that movie that Jamie told me I should check out?” Siri will dig up the message from last week. And when you’re filling out a form and say, “Add my passport number here,” Siri can extract the number from a saved photo of your passport and drop it in.

Onscreen Awareness

Siri will be able to understand and take action with things on your screen. So when a friend texts you recommending a new coffee shop in the neighborhood, you can simply say, “How long would it take me to walk there from home?” and Siri will understand just what you mean.

In-App Actions

Siri can take hundreds of new actions on your behalf in both first- and third-party apps. The next time you’re editing photos, you’ll be able to say, “Make this photo warmer,” and Siri will make adjustments using the Photos app. Siri can also take actions across apps. So after you’re done editing that photo, say, “Add this to my ratatouille recipe note,” and Siri will seamlessly transition from the Photos app to complete the task.

However, Gurman reports that software bugs could “delay or restrict its release,” which was initially expected for April but could be postponed until May.

Some of these features may miss iOS 18.4 and instead come with an iOS 18.5 software update.

Internally, the company has been planning to introduce the technology as part of iOS 18.4, the version of its mobile operating system coming in April. 

But now Apple is considering delaying or limiting at least some of the overhaul until iOS 18.5, which will be released as early as May, the people said. […]

Inside Apple, many employees testing the new Siri have found that these features don’t yet work consistently. And it’s nearing crunch time for the software to be ready. Though iOS 18.4 won’t be released publicly until April, the beta version for developers is expected to debut as early as next week.

At least we got the new Siri animation… Read Gurman’s full report here.

Apple hasn’t shared when these Siri updates will arrive beyond iOS 18 in 2025. That technically provides Apple with runway through August to launch these features, but iOS 19 will be in beta in June.