At WWDC, Apple is poised to overhaul Siri as reliability gaps loom in the AI race

Apple is preparing to step into its biggest artificial intelligence moment of the year at its Worldwide Developers Conference, with the opening keynote on Monday, June 8. In advance of the event, Apple has said WWDC will feature “AI advancements” alongside new developer tools and software updates, beginning with the Keynote and followed by the Platforms State of the Union. While WWDC is usually software-focused rather than hardware-focused, analysts expect Apple to use the occasion to show how it is addressing one of its most visible AI challenges: Siri. (Siri is Apple’s voice assistant, built into iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other devices.)

Reporting that circulated ahead of WWDC, including a Yahoo Finance/CNN piece, framed the conference as Apple’s chance to “fix” a Siri problem it recognizes internally. Apple has not previewed the specific changes to Siri in its public WWDC announcements so far. Its official WWDC messaging instead stays high level, emphasizing AI advancements but not detailing which Siri capabilities will be unveiled or how far along they are across the Apple ecosystem.

The pressure to improve Siri is not new. Apple previously discussed holding back advanced, AI-powered Siri features because they did not meet the company’s reliability bar. In coverage of Apple’s WWDC 2025 discussion of delayed Siri features, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, said the new Siri experience “did not converge” on the quality level Apple needed and that the team “wanted it to be really, really reliable” but could not achieve that reliability in the expected timeframe. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s SVP of Global Marketing, similarly pointed to a concern about shipping a product with an error rate that Apple felt was unacceptable.

Those delayed features, as described in the same reporting, included elements such as “on-screen awareness,” “personal context” understanding, and the ability for Siri to take actions within apps. Apple had previewed some of that direction in 2024. The company’s decision to delay was a bet that Siri would be more useful if it could reliably interpret requests and follow through, rather than performing inconsistently.

In addition to reliability, the competitive backdrop matters. Apple’s AI push has been shaped by partnerships and platform choices as rivals roll out more capable assistant experiences. According to the Associated Press, Apple uses Google’s Gemini model to help power its AI features, and analysts expect Siri to be reimagined as an AI chatbot. That would mean a more conversational interface, memory to pick up from earlier parts of a conversation, and a more “agentic” approach, where a system can carry out multiple tasks across devices with a single request. (Agentic, in this context, means the assistant can coordinate steps rather than simply answering.)

For Apple, the stakes are also organizational. The Associated Press reported that this WWDC will be Tim Cook’s last as CEO before the leadership transition to John Ternus in September. With Apple trying to regain momentum on AI features that were announced earlier and then reshaped, Siri is a high-visibility proving ground because it is embedded in daily device use rather than a stand-alone experiment.

Still, important details remain uncertain until Apple actually presents the product. Apple has given WWDC-level assurances about AI advancements and developer tools, but it has not, in its WWDC announcements, confirmed what the revamped Siri will be called, which devices will get it first, what the feature set will include, or how Apple will validate performance and reliability at launch. The only confirmed facts so far are the event timing and the broad AI emphasis in Apple’s own messaging, while the specifics of “fixing” Siri appear to be largely an external expectation rather than a documented roadmap.