Apple's Conversational Siri due in... 2026?

I do enjoy reading Theo Priestly's comments on LinkedIn and today's post is no exception. He's highlighting this post by Bloomberg highlighting that Apple is apparently readying 'Conversational Siri' (or "LLM Siri" as it's apparently referred to internally at Apple) for a 2026 launch.

This – as Theo points out – is hardly 'catching up'.

If anything, it's seriously late.

But it does give a lot of opportunities for others to continue to innovate heavily.

You only have to look at how people are readily adopting voice and conversational interfaces for everything to see how much of an important medium 'chat' or 'voice' already is.

Siri is unfortunately seriously, seriously behind today, let alone in next, next year.

In the move toward a Conversational AI world, I can imagine many vendors like Apple finding themselves boxed into their existing 'app only' user experience metaphor, especially when you have so much to defend.

Microsoft's aim to place Copilot as the UI for enterprise conversational interfaces is, I think, a good attempt. You need to start somewhere.

In a world whereby I can do almost anything on my phone thanks to the dozens of critical apps already installed and 'permissioned', it's surprising how much I simply can't be bothered nowadays.

It's already too cognitively frustrating having to tap-tap-tap and wait for everyone's app interface to upload, query it's server(s), etc., etc., before I can get to the function or information I need.

I need my Jarvis equivalent to be able to do all this for me. That's where I think Apple should be focusing: Launching an enhanced version of something like "AI/UI Kit" to enable developers to surface all of their key app functions to me, seamlessly, via voice – and make Siri the (Iron Man style) Jarvis for a billion people.