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Apple is struggling to upgrade to its artificial intelligence vocal assistant for the iPhone, with investors.
Recently deceased employees told Financial Times that the Silicon Valley giant had been noted by challenges with Siri’s update using large models of cutting -edge languages that can provide more sophisticated responses to spoken guests.
Apple has tried to build its own LLM on automatic learning technology that currently feeds Siri, a product already used in hundreds of millions of its best -selling devices, in order to create a truly conversational assistant.
Former leaders said that the process of integration of technologies led to bugs, a problem not confronted by competitors such as OPENAI who built generative vocal assistants from zero.
A former Apple executive said: “It was obvious that you were not going to reorganize Siri by doing what the leaders called” the climbing of the hill “, which means gradually developing the product rather than rebuilding it from zero.
“It is clear that they have stumbled,” added the person.
Siri’s updates constitute a key element of “Apple Intelligence”, a series of AI features announced at the global conference of company developers last year and intended to stimulate sales of equipment.
The FT reported this week that Apple’s attempt to deploy the characteristics of AI in China, fueled by models manufactured by Alibaba, is retained by a Beijing regulator. Sensitive agreements in the country involving American technological companies have been examined in response to the trade war by American president Donald Trump.
The repeated failures to publish the features of Apple Intelligence that have already been announced have meant that expectations are low for this year WWDC, which starts next week.
“We are to the point where investors already know what the good news is potentially, and this is: we first delivered what you promised last year,” explains Samik Chatterjee at JPMorgan.
The difficulties of AI weighed on the stock of the technology giant. It was the most efficient of the so-called magnificent stocks of 7 technologies in 2025, down around 18% since the start of the year and below the Nasdaq, technological heavy, which is largely flat.
Trump’s prices, competitive threats in China and legal pressure on Apple high margin service activities have also led to investor concerns about its long -term growth.
At the heart of Apple’s AI AI disorders is Siri, its inherited vocal assistant which is considered essential to unlock the real “agentic” capacities on the iPhone and other Apple devices.
When Chatgpt was launched at the end of 2022, “the way companies were doing conversational interaction quickly changed, and it was clear that Siri was short,” said another former Apple employee who worked on technology before launch.
The person added that he was “surprised” to see the features announced last year who ultimately “do not arrive” in time for the initial exit of Apple Intelligence.
In addition to exploiting much larger and more powerful models, Openai, Google and Perplexity have all launched vocal assistants who are largely considered more intelligent than Apple.
The response of the iPhone manufacturer was to focus on the annual conference of last year’s developers on his own AI thrust, where he teased an assistant improved by the AI capable of reading the user screen, to take advantage of their contextual information and take measures within their applications.
A group of AI features such as writing aids, image generation and emoji and research based on cameras have already struck the market.
The changes announced in Siri are not yet released, however. The head of management, Tim Cook, recently admitted that the technology had not met the company’s “high quality” and “took a little more time than we thought”.
Delays led to Apple drawing featured television advertisements The last of us Star Bella Ramsey who promoted the new Siri update. The company has led to a number of false advertising prosecution of consumers.
The current delays in Siri mean that Apple is mainly three years or more of the delivery “of a really modern AI assistant, long after Google and others have integrated such technology,” analysts of Bank of America wrote on Monday.
Failures have caused changes to Apple. John Giannandrea, his AI guru poache from Google in 2018, saw the Siri product division withdrawn from his delivery earlier this year and transferred to Mike Rockwell, the executive behind the vision pro helmet.
A former Apple manager said that fragmented management teams had led to the absence of a unified strategy around AI, aggravated by a first lack of appetite on the part of senior executives to allocate a large enough budget for the construction of technology.
Another challenge is the accent put by Apple on the confidentiality and safety of users. It has prioritized the execution of its AI features via smaller models and remaining user data on the device, which, according to the old employees, adds another layer of complexity to the challenge.
This contrasts with larger LLMs such as those who feed the OpenAi Chatppt, which cross the cloud on powerful servers. Apple relied on Openai by publishing the integration of chatgpt with Siri.
Since then, Openai has reported its own ambitions in the material space, the CEO Sam Altman announcing an agreement of $ 6.5 billion to acquire IO, the company founded by the former designer of Apple Jony Ive, who will now create products for a potential rival. Apple’s shares fell by around 2% on the news.
