Apple explains the delay of its AI-powered Siri in iOS 27, with Mike Rockwell doing the talking

Apple has officially explained why the updated, AI-powered version of its Siri voice assistant arrived in iOS 27 later than originally expected. Siri chief Mike Rockwell laid out the details at a technical press session following the WWDC keynote.

Who is Mike Rockwell

Mike Rockwell took charge of Siri's engineering team in 2025 after an internal reorganization at Apple. Before that, he led development of visionOS and the Vision Pro headset. That means he came to Siri from product engineering, not from John Giannandrea's machine learning group, which originally ran the voice assistant. The reshuffle itself amounted to an admission that Apple's previous approach to building an AI-powered Siri could not meet the originally announced timeline.

• The updated Siri with AI features ships as part of iOS 27
• Apple gave its official explanation for the delay at a post-WWDC press session
• Siri chief Mike Rockwell delivered the explanation
• Rockwell took over the Siri team in 2025 and previously oversaw visionOS and Vision Pro

Why did the Siri update take so long?

The AI Siri saga goes back to WWDC 2024, when Apple announced a personalized assistant that could understand on-screen context and take actions inside apps. The launch of those features slipped several times, and throughout 2025 Apple never managed to ship them in the form it had originally promised. According to media reports, the holdup came from the difficulty of rebuilding Siri's architecture around large language models and from Apple's internal standards for the quality and reliability of the assistant's responses. Apple was not prepared to release a version that fell short of its own bar.

Things were further complicated by parallel talks about Apple partnering with outside model providers. The company considered using third-party large language models for some Siri features, which required extra negotiations and testing on top of its in-house development. By the time it presented iOS 27 at WWDC, Apple had clearly decided to state the reasons for the delay directly and publicly, rather than leave users and developers without an explanation as it had with earlier postponements.

The situation is especially sensitive for Apple given broader criticism of its AI strategy. Since announcing Apple Intelligence in 2024, the company has regularly been accused of lagging behind rivals such as Google and OpenAI in bringing generative AI into its products. Explaining the Siri delay publicly at a technical press session is an attempt to change the conversation: to show that the delay stems from a deliberate decision not to ship a half-baked product, not from a lack of progress inside the company.

What it means

The drawn-out Siri overhaul shows how hard it is for big tech companies to build generative AI into existing products that have been refined over years. Apple didn't just have to update features — it had to rebuild the team and its whole approach to developing the voice assistant from scratch.