Apple has explained why the new Siri AI assistant – powered by Google’s Gemini – took so long to come to fruition. The company had received serious criticism for the long delays and even accusations it had demonstrated features that hadn’t yet been realised beyond the concept stage.
However, the two year delay from the original announcement at WWDC 2024 to the relaunch at WWDC can be partially explained by the revelation Apple stopped trying to retrofit existing Siri and instead admitted the need to build a replacement from the ground up.
During a press roundtable at WWDC Mike Rockwell, who became the leader of the Siri platform in 2025, said the initial changes Apple had made “wasn’t delivering on the vision” so it was torn down and rebuilt atop the new Apple Intelligence Foundational Models that were previously announced.
During the roundtable attended by 9to5Mac, Rockwell said: “Last year, we had actually built a first version of this that was sort of incremental on top of the original Siri that added tool calling, and we had it working. But we didn’t feel it was really delivering on the vision and the experience that we wanted to do. We also had a design, which required much more extensive changes, and we decided to go with that.
“So we went back, and we rebuilt Siri from the ground up, literally, tore it to the ground, rebuilt it from the ground up, on top of the incredible models which Amar [Subramanya] just told us about. It allowed us to build a profoundly more capable Siri. So it’s a Siri that has its own application, it’s natively multimodal, it’s privacy from the ground up.
“And it’s available across all of your platforms, which is really important to us. So you have it on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and Watch, Vision Pro, as well as in CarPlay and AirPods. And it’s the same Siri across all this. You’ve got a common experience.”
Now Apple is finally set to deliver on the vision for the new Siri that includes deeply contextual information, on-screen awareness, interaction with all of your key apps and much, much more. We’re excited to give it a try.
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