Apple's Siri revamp reportedly adds auto-delete chat controls

Apple’s rebuilt Siri app will reportedly let users decide how long chat histories are kept, an early signal the company is treating privacy controls as a product feature rather than a buried setting. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on Sunday that users will be able to set conversations to delete after 30 days, one year, or keep them indefinitely. Engadget reported the revamped assistant is expected to debut at WWDC, which starts on 8 June 2026.

If Gurman’s reporting is accurate, Apple would be handing users a retention choice ahead of the new Siri reaching a wider audience. The timing matters because the company appears ready to treat conversation storage as a visible product setting rather than a privacy-policy footnote—at a moment when AI assistants are asking users for longer and more personal exchanges. A chat-style assistant holds context across turns and remembers what was asked moments earlier, making the exchange feel less like a voice command and more like a conversation. As that experience becomes more natural, users need to understand clearly what is being kept, for how long, and what control they have. The retention menu does not answer every question. It does show Apple expects chats to accumulate and wants users to have an obvious way to cap that history.

Apple has not publicly confirmed the feature. The details come through reporting—Bloomberg appears to have the original account—rather than a product announcement from the company. 9to5Mac wrote that the same report pointed to a standalone Siri app that may carry a beta label at launch. For now, it reads as Apple testing how explicit to be about chat retention before unveiling the product formally.

The reported options are unusually concrete. Thirty days is short enough to appeal to users who want a useful assistant without a long-running archive of their queries. One year offers a middle ground for people who value continuity across trips, purchases and repeated questions. Keeping chats forever is the convenience setting. Together the three choices make retention something a buyer can grasp without reading a technical explainer—a user preference rather than an abstract brand promise.

Retention controls are more interesting than the leak. Apple still has to prove the rebuilt Siri is competitive as an AI assistant, but a retention toggle is something users can inspect on day one, unlike model-performance claims or architectural choices. Whether Apple ships the setting or not, it signals that chat history belongs in the product controls, not in the infrastructure. For Australian iPhone owners, Siri is built into a mass-market device, reachable by anyone who owns the phone—not confined to early adopters. A timer is simple enough to explain in a retail setting and specific enough to matter to people who share a phone with family or do not want years of assistant prompts stored by default. The feature is a small setting with real privacy weight.

The next test is what Apple announces on stage. A retention timer helps, but the full privacy picture depends on the default setting, where chats are stored, whether users can wipe history immediately, and what happens when someone turns the feature off. Those details separate a rumoured setting from an actual policy. If Apple unveils the revamped Siri at WWDC on 8 June 2026, they will be among the first questions asked.