June 12, 2025 – In an interview with The Wall Street Journal today, two top Apple executives clarified that the Siri demonstration presented at last year’s WWDC24 was indeed based on a fully functional version of the software.
When questioned by Joanna Stern, a reporter from The Wall Street Journal, about whether the Siri personalization features showcased during Apple’s 2024 WWDC keynote were ready for operation, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, provided a clear response. “The software we demonstrated was running in real-time, utilizing authentic large language models and semantic search technologies. Everything shown was genuine,” he affirmed. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Marketing, further emphasized, “Contrary to rumors, it wasn’t just a demo-specific version.”
Last year’s WWDC event saw Apple unveil several new capabilities for Siri, such as a deeper understanding of users’ personal contexts, screen content awareness, and fine-grained application control. However, the promised features have yet to materialize, and in March of this year, Apple even removed a YouTube advertisement that showcased Siri’s contextual understanding capabilities.
In explaining the delay, Federighi attributed it to significant architectural limitations in the initial version of Siri’s personalized features, which fell short of Apple’s stringent standards for quality.
