Tim Cook Says the New Siri Is on Track for 2026 as Apple Intelligence Takes Shape

Tim Cook says Apple’s overhauled Siri is on track for 2026 – here’s what that really means

Apple’s AI reset under the Apple Intelligence banner has prompted an obvious question all year: can the company move quickly enough to match its ambitions? Fresh remarks on Apple’s Q3 2025 earnings call suggest the answer is finally tilting toward yes. Tim Cook said the team is making “good progress” on the new Siri and that the upgraded assistant is still targeting a 2026 debut. That timeline lines up with what we’ve been hearing about a substantial Spring 2026 iOS release – likely iOS 26.4 – designed to unlock a wave of Apple Intelligence features across iPhone and, by extension, the broader ecosystem.

Why does this matter? Because Apple isn’t just promising a snappier voice or a new animation. The company is positioning Siri as an agentic system – software that can understand what you’re doing, reason over your personal context, and take actions for you inside apps with minimal hand-holding. If Apple executes, Siri shifts from a clever search box into a genuine digital aide.

Three pillars Apple plans to ship in Spring 2026

• In-App Actions: Siri will be able to carry out context-aware tasks inside supported apps using just your voice – think adding an item to a grocery list in your notes app, sending a message through your preferred messenger, or starting a playlist in your music app without bouncing through menus. Crucially, these are actions, not shortcuts you have to pre-build.
• Personal Context Awareness: The assistant will leverage personal data you already have on device to deliver tailored help. A straightforward example Apple has floated: ask Siri to find “that podcast Tom texted me last week,” and it will search your Messages to surface the relevant link.
• On-Screen Awareness: Siri will understand what’s currently on your display and act accordingly. Reading a web article? You could ask for a summary, then have it draft and send highlights to a colleague in Messages – all without manually copying, switching, and pasting.

Taken together, those capabilities represent a pragmatic definition of Apple Intelligence: a blend of language understanding, interface awareness, and secure access to the information you already own, applied to the everyday friction that slows people down.

A glimpse today: Sky on macOS

Mac users can already experience a flavor of this agentic future through Sky, an AI assistant for macOS that operates in a small floating window. Sky understands what’s on your screen and then follows through on commands – summarizing a page, composing an email, or sending a note via Messages – often chaining multiple apps together. Power users can extend it with custom scripts, shortcuts, and commands to expand what each app can do. Notably, OpenAI recently acquired Software Applications Incorporated, the company behind Sky, underscoring how hot the race is to own the “do this for me” layer on personal computers.

Progress, but not without turbulence

Cook’s optimism doesn’t mean the road has been smooth. Reporting in August noted Apple engineers were wrestling with reliability, especially when Siri needed to operate consistently across many apps or in high-stakes situations like banking. Organizational churn hasn’t helped: Ke Yang, appointed only weeks earlier to lead Apple’s Answers, Knowledge and Information (AKI) team – the group responsible for factual grounding and retrieval – is said to be leaving for Meta. For any AI assistant, those are sensitive fault lines: accuracy, security, and the breadth of integrations define whether people actually trust it.

What to watch between now and 2026

Developer adoption. In-App Actions and On-Screen Awareness rise or fall with third-party support. Expect Apple to provide APIs and guardrails so apps can expose safe, useful capabilities while keeping user data private and permissions explicit.

Reliability under pressure. Everyday tasks – messages, notes, music – are the easy pitch. The real test is whether the new Siri can execute in complex, multi-step, or sensitive flows without confusion. Banking and identity-bound tasks will likely become the benchmark scenarios.

Delivery cadence. Apple appears to be pacing Apple Intelligence as a sequence rather than a single drop. If iOS 26.4 is the Spring 2026 anchor, watch for pre-launch betas that harden the feature set and for macOS and iPadOS to receive parallel capabilities so the experience feels coherent across devices.

The bottom line

Apple is steering Siri toward a more capable, context-aware future, and the company’s latest guidance keeps that promise intact for 2026. If In-App Actions, Personal Context Awareness, and On-Screen Awareness land as described, the assistant could graduate from Q&A to genuinely getting things done. The remaining question isn’t if Siri will be smarter – it’s whether Apple can make it reliably helpful, trustworthy across critical apps, and broadly supported by the software you use every day. That’s the bar for Apple Intelligence, and 2026 is when we find out if it clears it.