Apple explains Siri delays, teases more new features are coming

3 weeks ago 1

During its WWDC keynote, Apple addressed one big elephant in the room: Siri’s delayed features that were announced last year but never shipped. And now in a new interview, Siri’s recently-appointed boss Craig Federighi has explained more of the reasoning behind the delay, and teased even more new features are coming.

Craig Federighi promises Apple will ship every Siri feature previously announced ‘and more’

Craig Federighi is Apple’s software chief, and as such tends to get a lot of PR time during WWDC.

In an interview with YouTuber iJustine, Federighi goes into greater detail than before on the delayed Siri features originally expected in iOS 18.

What we said a while ago was that we were really working hard to get those [features] to come together. [We] had them working internally, but not working well enough.

You know, when you have an experience like asking Siri to do something, either it becomes something you can depend on reliably, or it’s something in the end you’re not going to use. And we were not able to take the approach we were taking to the quality level in the time frame that initially we thought we could. And so, we’re continuing to build on it.

Unpacking Federighi’s statement, there are several solid explanations given for Siri’s feature delays.

Apple didn’t want to ship features that weren’t working well enough
It also knew that unreliable Siri features ultimately aren’t useful to anyone
And Apple’s original approach in building the features didn’t pan out as expected, implying they had to switch approaches

In addition to this explanation, Federighi doubled down on Apple’s promise to one day ship everything that’s been announced previously.

He even teased that more new features were coming by adding, “and more.”

But those won’t be detailed until they’re actually ready.

Here’s what he said:

We really look forward to releasing everything we talked about in the past, and more.

We don’t really want to commit to that until we have it in hand.

What do you think of Apple’s Siri delay explanation? Let us know in the comments.