Siri at 15: How Apple Fell Behind in AI and What It's Doing about It

Tech giant Apple is expected to bring major upgrades to Siri at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 8, more than a decade after the voice assistant's debut, multiple reprts said.

The new Siri has reportedly been built from scratch for the AI era, a major undertaking for a company that pioneered the concept of a smartphone voice assistant but has since watched new rivals race ahead.

How Siri Got Here

Apple first introduced Siri with the iPhone 4S on October 14, 2011, positioning it as the first AI voice assistant on a smartphone. The launch was widely seen as a landmark moment in consumer technology, bringing voice-based interaction to mainstream users for the first time.

Between 2012 and 2014, Siri expanded from iPhone to iPad, gaining capabilities such as sports scores, restaurant reservations, movie listings and FaceTime calls. In 2014, iOS 8 introduced the "Hey Siri" hands-free trigger, allowing users to activate the assistant without pressing a button, a feature that remains in use today.

With iOS 10 in 2016, Apple opened Siri to third-party apps including WhatsApp and Uber and later brought it to Mac with macOS Sierra. Subsequent updates added HomePod support and machine learning upgrades aimed at improving voice naturalness and contextual understanding.

For several years, Siri remained the dominant voice assistant on mobile, benefiting from its deep integration across Apple's ecosystem and its presence on hundreds of millions of devices worldwide.

The Widening Gap

Despite being accessible across Apple's installed base of 2.5 billion devices, Siri has struggled to keep pace with newer AI offerings. According to a Reuters report, hundreds of millions of consumers have been engaging with apps from OpenAI and Anthropic instead. In China and elsewhere, consumers are turning to AI agents to manage daily schedules and handle routine tasks.

Between 2022 and 2024, Apple accelerated its generative AI efforts as Siri fell behind amid the rapid rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Google and Anthropic also entered the AI race with their own advanced models, intensifying pressure on Apple to modernise Siri, according to a Business Today report. Where rivals were offering conversational, context-aware responses and the ability to generate text, images and code, Siri remained largely limited to structured commands and basic queries.

At WWDC 2024, Apple announced Apple Intelligence and an overhauled Siri capable of understanding context across apps. However, several promised features, including deeper app integration and the ability to take actions across apps, were delayed beyond the initial iOS 18 launch, further widening the perception gap between Siri and its competitors.

The Data Dilemma

Apple is sitting on what the Reuters report describes as an AI gold mine, the personal data that lives on every iPhone, including emails, messages, calendar appointments and other information spread across the operating system and apps. That data could make Siri's responses significantly more useful and improve the assistant's ability to carry out complex, personalised tasks on a user's behalf, the report added.

However, Apple's challenge is that such data is locked down in its operating systems in the name of privacy and security. Third-party apps are deliberately restricted from reading data from one another, and even Apple itself cannot access much of this information without a user's explicit permission, the report said.

This architectural decision, long celebrated as a privacy feature, has become a constraint in the age of AI, where access to personal context is often what separates a useful assistant from a truly capable one.

Notably, the iPhone-maker last month agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that it misled iPhone buyers by falsely touting artificial intelligence capabilities for its Siri voice assistant in late 2024.

Plaintiffs alleged that Apple “promoted AI capabilities that did not exist at the time, do not exist now, and will not exist for two or more years” in order to boost smartphone sales.

According to a previous report by The Guardian, Apple still has not fully released the more “personalized” version of Siri, despite announcing it two years ago.

The June 8 WWDC event is widely seen as a defining moment for Siri. With rivals continuing to advance and consumer expectations rising, Apple faces pressure to demonstrate that its rebuilt assistant can compete meaningfully in the current AI landscape.

The upgrades expected at WWDC 2026 represent Apple's most significant attempt yet to close the gap with competitors. The updated Siri could become the biggest signal of how Apple is reworking its products in an era of growing use of chatbots and artificial intelligence.