Siri, are you still there?

“Hey Siri, when was the last earthquake in Turkey?”

Silence. Then: “I found some results on the web. You can check them on your iPhone.”

I asked this on my HomePod. In 2026. The same device Apple sells as a smart home hub. That’s Siri right now — a voice assistant that punts to your phone the moment you ask it anything beyond a timer.

A brief history of waiting

Siri launched in October 2011 on the iPhone 4s. Susan Bennett’s voice felt like the future. You could ask her questions, set reminders, send texts — and it actually worked, mostly. For 2011, it was magic.

Then came a decade of incremental updates. iOS 7 brought new, younger-sounding voices. “Hey Siri” went hands-free. SiriKit let third-party apps plug in, sort of. HomePod support arrived. But nothing fundamental changed. Siri stayed a command parser pretending to be a conversationalist.

In June 2024, Apple announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC. Personal context. On-screen awareness. App actions. The crowd cheered. I believed them. They said it would ship with iOS 18.4 in early 2025.

It didn’t.

March 2025: Apple officially delayed the AI-powered Siri. The features wouldn’t make iOS 18.4. They targeted spring 2026 instead — iOS 26.4.

January 2026: Apple revealed a partnership with Google. Roughly $1 billion per year for access to Gemini, Google’s large language model, to power the new Siri backend. Apple said they’d build their own models eventually, but needed Gemini to ship something now.

February 2026 — this week: Bloomberg reports that internal testing isn’t going well. The new Siri may slip past iOS 26.4 to iOS 26.5, or even iOS 27. That would mean 2027 at the earliest. Three years after the announcement.

What Siri actually does in 2026

Here’s my real Siri usage: alarms, timers, shopping lists, weather, the occasional joke. That’s it. That’s basically 2012 functionality with a nicer voice.

The HomePod experience is particularly rough. Ask Siri a straightforward question and there’s a coin flip between a useful answer and “check your iPhone.” Ask a follow-up question and she’s already forgotten what you were talking about. There’s no conversation. There’s no context. There’s just a series of disconnected commands.

I’ve been using Siri since day one. I never switched to Alexa or Google. But loyalty doesn’t make the experience less disappointing.

The competition moved on

While Apple’s been rewriting Siri’s architecture, the rest of the industry shipped products that actually work.

I use ChatGPT and Claude daily — for writing, for code, for research, for thinking through problems. These tools hold context across thousands of words. They remember what you said three paragraphs ago. They reason, they correct themselves, they get better with every update.

Siri can’t remember what I asked two seconds ago.

The gap isn’t closing. It’s widening. Every month that Apple delays, ChatGPT and Claude ship another update that makes Siri look more like a relic. Apple isn’t competing with 2024 AI anymore — they’re trying to catch up to a target that moves faster than they do.

The Gemini bet

Paying Google $1 billion a year for AI is pragmatic. It’s also humbling.

Apple — the company that builds its own chips, designs its own operating systems, and controls every pixel on screen — couldn’t build a competitive language model in time. So they’re licensing one from the company they compete with on phones, browsers, maps, and email.

To be fair, it’s not the worst strategy. Ship something now with Gemini, build your own models in parallel, transition later. Apple reportedly calls this the “V1 to V2 architecture” move. The subtext is clear: V1 didn’t work. They’re starting over.

Can Apple catch up?

They can. If they’re smart about it.

Apple has advantages nobody else has: the hardware, the ecosystem, the privacy story, the install base. A billion devices that people already talk to. If the new Siri actually understands context, remembers your preferences, and works across apps — that’s a product no startup can replicate.

But execution on AI has been poor. The repeated delays erode trust. I don’t put 100% trust in Apple the way I did in earlier years, and Siri is one of the biggest reasons. When a company promises something three years in a row and doesn’t deliver, you stop taking the next promise at face value.

Still waiting

Siri launched in 2011 — the same year Steve Jobs died. Fourteen years later, she still can’t hold a conversation.

Apple says 2026 is the year everything changes. Maybe it is. But I’ve heard that before, and my HomePod still tells me to check my iPhone.

I’ll keep using Siri for timers and alarms. For everything else, there’s Claude.