‘We tore it to the ground’: Apple says it built Siri AI ‘from the ground up’, but admits this wasn't the original plan — a first version of its new voice assistant was ready last year

• Apple has explained why Siri's AI overhaul has taken so long
• Initially, the company built an "iterative" version on top of the existing Siri, but this didn't deliver on Apple's vision
• So instead Siri was then rebuilt from the ground up

Siri’s AI overhaul is finally set to arrive later this year, long after it was initially promised — but Apple has now shed some light on what, exactly, took so long.

In a post-WWDC talk attended by 9to5Mac and TechRadar, Mike Rockwell — the Apple executive who took leadership of the Siri team last year — explained that, back in 2025, the company managed to build a working version of Siri AI “that was sort of incremental on top of the original Siri” but that “we didn’t feel it was really delivering on the vision and the experience that we wanted to do.”

As a result, the team then “rebuilt Siri from the ground up, literally, tore it to the ground,” with the end result being “a profoundly more capable Siri.”

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A necessary shift in strategy

So, in other words, it sounds like Apple pivoted away from an initial plan of adding to the existing Siri after realizing this wouldn’t cut it with expectant fans, and then started work on the lengthy job of completely rebuilding its digital assistant.

Whether this is a satisfying explanation is debatable — it could be argued that a company with as much talent and experience as Apple should have already known what would be necessary to build a true AI assistant, especially when there were plenty of rival models the company could look to for inspiration.

But it does at least go some way to explaining why this whole endeavor has taken quite so long. And while Apple’s initial goal of delivering an incremental upgrade might have been shortsighted, the ultimate decision to abandon that and rebuild Siri from the ground up was probably the right one, given how impressive the competition is in this space.

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