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Here comes new Siri again
Brief published June 7, 2026 ยท Original source published June 5, 2026
Original reporting by Allison Johnson at theverge.com.
Automated brief. Verify important details at the original source.
Apple Announces Siri 4.0: The Virtual Assistant That Will Definitely Work This Time, We Promise
After years of watching Siri fumble basic requests like a first-year intern trying to operate the office coffee machine, Apple is reportedly preparing to unveil yet another "revolutionary" version of its voice assistant at WWDC. Because nothing says "we've got this figured out" quite like the fourth major relaunch of the same product that still can't reliably set a timer without an existential crisis.
The tech giant finds itself in the peculiar position of being fashionably late to the AI party that it arguably started back in 2011. While OpenAI's ChatGPT has been stealing headlines and Google's Bard has been... well, existing, Apple has been quietly watching from the sidelines like that friend who shows up two hours late to brunch and acts like they planned it that way. The company that once revolutionized personal computing by putting a computer in everyone's pocket is now playing catch-up in a field where the competition has moved from "Hey Siri, what's the weather?" to "Hey ChatGPT, write me a business plan for a dog walking service that also offers cryptocurrency advice."
This isn't Siri's first rodeo, or even its second. The original Siri launched with the iPhone 4S in 2011, promising to be your personal digital assistant. Instead, it became the virtual equivalent of that coworker who mishears everything in meetings and responds with complete confidence to questions nobody asked. Remember when asking Siri to "call Mom" was a 50-50 shot between actually calling your mother or accidentally FaceTiming your college roommate from 2003? Those were simpler times, when AI disappointment was measured in individual phone calls rather than entire conversation threads about whether a large language model truly understands the concept of consciousness.
The first major Siri reboot came with iOS 12 in 2018, complete with Shortcuts and the promise of improved natural language processing. This was Apple's attempt to teach Siri how conversations actually work, rather than treating every interaction like a game of voice-activated Mad Libs. The results were... mixed. Yes, Siri could finally handle follow-up questions without completely forgetting the context, but it still had the conversational skills of a particularly literal-minded robot trying to pass a Turing test administered by someone who had never met a human before.
Then came the 2020 refresh with iOS 14, where Apple quietly admitted that maybe, just maybe, having Siri take up the entire screen every time you asked about the weather was not the pinnacle of user interface design. The new compact design was genuinely better, like finally getting a sports car after years of driving a minivan to pick up groceries. But underneath the sleeker exterior, Siri was still fundamentally the same assistant that would confidently tell you there were no restaurants within 50 miles of Times Square.
Now we're approaching what insiders are calling the "real" Siri redesign, powered by large language models and all the AI buzzwords that have been setting venture capital hearts aflutter for the past two years. The rumored integration with OpenAI's technology suggests Apple has finally acknowledged what everyone else figured out around 2022: that maybe, just maybe, the future of AI assistants involves more than just pattern-matching voice commands to predetermined responses. It's like watching someone finally admit that their decade-old flip phone might not be the ideal device for taking Instagram photos.
The timing is both awkward and potentially brilliant. Awkward because Apple is essentially admitting that their previous three attempts at making Siri actually useful were elaborate beta tests conducted on hundreds of millions of users. Brilliant because while everyone else has been racing to ship AI chatbots that hallucinate with confidence, Apple has been sitting back, watching the competition faceplant into the uncanny valley, and taking notes. Sometimes being late to the party means you get to see which appetizers gave everyone food poisoning.
For the millions of developers who have spent years working around Siri's limitations, this news arrives with all the emotional complexity of an ex-partner promising they've "really changed this time." Sure, the new Siri might finally understand context and nuance, but how many times can you get excited about the prospect of an assistant that won't confidently misinterpret your request to "remind me to buy milk" as "remind me to buy mulk" and then spend five minutes explaining that it doesn't know what mulk is? The smart money says most developers will wait for the actual release before updating their "Siri workarounds" documentation.
The broader implications here extend beyond just another product refresh cycle. If Apple actually manages to ship an AI assistant that works as advertised, it could shift the entire conversation around AI from "look what this experimental chatbot can do" to "look what your pocket computer can do without requiring a computer science degree to operate." That's the difference between impressive party tricks and actual utility, between technology that gets demo'd at conferences and technology that gets used by your parents.
But let's be honest: we've been here before, havenched over keynote livestreams, watching executives in perfectly pressed jeans promise that this time, finally, Siri will understand what we actually want instead of what we technically said. The most likely outcome is that Siri 4.0 will be genuinely better at some things, confusingly worse at others, and still inexplicably unable to play the right song when you're driving and really just want to hear that one track without pulling over to type it manually into your phone like some kind of technological caveman.