In just a few brief months, we should be optimistic about getting our initial glimpse of a completely revamped AI-enhanced Siri. After introducing it over a year and a half ago, Apple’s concept for a fresh Siri has encountered numerous engineering obstacles – yet it has not yet reached users’ devices. However, that is expected to change soon.
### Upcoming Siri Enhancements
At WWDC 2024, Apple presented three significant enhancements for Siri with Apple Intelligence:
– **Personal Context**: When conversing with Siri, it will understand the context of the information on your device, so you won’t need to know exactly where to locate something.
– **On-Screen Awareness**: Siri will be able to view your screen while you make a request, allowing you to provide less detail.
– **Executing Tasks in Apps**: Instead of having to launch an app for every trivial action, you’ll be able to instruct Siri to perform tasks for you.
Initially, these new Siri enhancements were expected to launch with iOS 18.4. However, Apple encountered technical challenges with the Siri engineering framework and decided to postpone it while they rebuilt Siri from scratch on a new LLM-based platform.
Currently, Apple is contemplating utilizing Google Gemini to support these features, rather than relying on on-device models. If they proceed with Gemini, it will use Private Cloud Compute, ensuring that Google still does not receive data from these queries.
Macworld’s Filipe Esposito recently indicated that the new Siri functionalities are expected to be released alongside iOS 26.4, according to revealed Apple code.
### AI Search Engine
In addition to the previously announced Siri features, Apple is developing a new capability: its own generative AI search engine. This initiative was first mentioned in August. According to a recent update from Mark Gurman, it could launch as early as March, coinciding with the release of iOS 26.4:
> Apple has seized this chance to revamp the assistant to introduce a new search product — internally referred to as World Knowledge Answers, or WKA — in order to compete with services like Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This feature is also slated for March as part of the enhanced Siri, and it may ultimately be integrated into the Safari browser and Spotlight search tool as well.
### Release Date
Although we cannot say for certain when iOS 26.4 will be released, if past patterns are any indication, it will likely arrive in March or April. This also suggests that we may see the first beta launch as early as next month. We could potentially catch our first glimpse of the all-new Siri in less than 6 weeks.