iOS 27’s new Siri AI is a huge upgrade from the old Siri, but it also took longer than expected to arrive. Here’s why the new Siri took so long, per Mike Rockwell.

Last week following Apple’s WWDC keynote, the company held a Siri and Apple Intelligence-focused tech talk with members of the press. 9to5Mac Editor-in-Chief Chance Miller was there, and shared extensive quotes from the session here from Apple’s Craig Federighi and Amar Subramanya.

Another participant in the talk was Mike Rockwell, who took on leadership for Siri just last year.

Rockwell provided some new context around why Siri AI took longer than hoped to ship. Here’s what he said:

Last year, we had actually built a first version of this that was sort of incremental on top of the original Siri that added tool calling, and we had it working. But we didn’t feel it was really delivering on the vision and the experience that we wanted to do.

We also had a design, which required much more extensive changes, and we decided to go with that.

So we went back, and we rebuilt Siri from the ground up, literally, tore it to the ground, rebuilt it from the ground up, on top of the incredible models which Amar just told us about.

It allowed us to build a profoundly more capable Siri. So it’s a Siri that has its own application, it’s natively multimodal, it’s privacy from the ground up.

And it’s available across all of your platforms, which is really important to us. So you have it on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and Watch, Vision Pro, as well as in CarPlay and AirPods. And it’s the same Siri across all this. You’ve got a common experience.

Based on Rockwell’s comments, it sounds like Apple’s original plan for Siri might have delivered some AI upgrades, but it wouldn’t have been the full-featured revamp that iOS 27 brings.

To achieve Siri AI, Apple instead opted to rebuild Siri “from the ground up.” It “tore it to the ground” and rebuilt on top of its new, more modern foundation.

What do you make of Rockwell’s explanation for Siri AI’s release timing? Let us know in the comments.

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