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Apple is struggling to offer upgrades to the iPhone’s AI voice assistant, with investors downbeating the possibility of major AI announcements at its flagship annual event next week.
A recent employee told the Financial Times that the Silicon Valley giant was hit by challenges by updating SIRI using state-of-the-art, leading language models that could provide a more refined response to voice prompts.
Apple is trying to build its own LLM through machine learning technology that currently powers Siri, a product already used in hundreds of millions of bestselling devices, with the aim of creating truly conversational assistants.
The former executive said the process of integrating technology has led to bugs. This is a problem not faced by competitors such as Openai, which built generative AI-based voice assistants from scratch.
The former Apple executive said, “It was clear that doing executives called “climbing the hills” would not refresh Siri.”
“It’s clear they stumbled,” the person added.
The SIRI update aims to form a key part of Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI features announced at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference last year, and to promote hardware sales.
FT is attempting to deploy Apple’s AI capabilities this week with a model created by Alibaba, and reported that it is being suppressed by Beijing regulators. The delicate transactions in countries involving high-tech companies are under closer scrutiny in response to US President Donald Trump’s trade war.
The recurring failure to release the already announced features of Apple Intelligence means there are low expectations for this year’s WWDC, which will launch next week.
“We’re somewhere where investors already know what the good news is potentially. Here’s what we first brought you what we promised last year,” says Samik Chatterjee of Jpmorgan.
The struggles of AI are focused on stocks in tech giants. The worst performance of the so-called seven tech stocks in 2025 fell by around 18% since the start of the year, below the largely flat, high-tech Nasdaq.
Trump’s tariffs, the threat of competition in China, and legal pressure on Apple’s margin-based services business have also led to investors’ concerns about its long-term growth.
Siri is at the heart of Apple’s AI problems. Siri is a legacy voice assistant that is considered important to unlock true “agent” capabilities on iPhones and other Apple devices.
When ChatGpt was launched in late 2022, “It was clear that the way companies were interacting with conversations was changing rapidly, and Siri was getting shorter,” said a former senior Apple employee who worked on technology before launching.
The person added that he was “shocked” to see the feature that he announced last year that he would “not make it” in time for the first release of Apple Intelligence.
Things like Openai, Google, Prplexity, and more have all launched voice assistants that are considered smarter than Apple, as well as running much larger and more powerful models.
The iPhone manufacturer’s response was to focus last year’s annual developer meeting on its own AI push. There, they teased an AI Upgrade Assistant that could read the user’s screen, pull out contextual information, and perform actions within the app.
Groups of AI features such as lighting AIDS, generation of images, emojis, and camera-based search have already appeared in the market.
However, the announced changes to Siri have not yet been released. Chief Executive Tim Cook recently admitted that the technology didn’t meet the company’s “high quality bars” and “takes a little longer than we thought.”
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Due to the delay, Apple has pulled a TV ad featuring Bella Ramsey, the last star to promote the new Siri update. The company has drawn many false advertising lawsuits from consumers.
The current delay to Siri means Apple is essentially more than three years away. Analysts at Bank of America wrote Monday, as they provide “really modern AI assistants after Google and others have integrated such technology.”
The failure led to changes in Apple. John Giannandrea, a leading AI guru poached by Google in 2018, transferred to Mike Rockwell, the executive behind Vision Pro Headset, when the Siri Products division was removed from his transfer earlier this year.
The former Apple executive said the fragmented leadership team led to a lack of a unified strategy around AI. This was exacerbated by the initial appetite shortage of top executives in order to allocate sufficient budgets to build the technology.
Another challenge is that Apple focuses on user privacy and security. We prioritize running AI functions through small models and user data. The former employee said he would add another layer of complexity to the challenge.
This contrasts with the massive LLM of LLM, which powers Openai’s ChatGPT running through the cloud on powerful servers. Apple has resorted to Openai by releasing ChatGPT integration with Siri.
Since then, Openai has demonstrated its own ambitions in the hardware space, with CEO Sam Altman unveiling a $6.5 billion deal to acquire IO, founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive. Apple’s stock fell by about 2% on the news.
