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Back then, Siri boasted an even
more irreverent tone — and a more
robust set of skills. Like fiction
writers dreaming up a character,
Dag Kittlaus, Siri’s co-founder and
chief executive, and Harry Saddler, a design expert, had carefully
crafted the assistant’s attitude
and backstory. It was to be “otherworldly,” “vaguely aware of popular culture” and armed with a “dry
wit,” Kittlaus says.
Ask it about gyms, and Siri
sent back a mocking, “Yeah, your
grip feels weak.” Ask, “What happened to HAL?” — the brainy
(and murderous) talking computer that starred in Stanley
Kubrick’s 1968 thriller 2001: A
Space Odyssey — and it delivered
a sullen, “I don’t want to talk
about it.” In those days, Siri still
had “fuck” in its lexicon.
That was before Apple washed
Siri’s mouth out with soap and
curbed many of its talents, even as
it endowed the assistant with new
gifts. The Siri that Apple introduced in October 2011, 16 months
after acquiring the technology
for a reported $150 to $250 million, had expanded its linguistic
range from one to multiple languages. It was scaled to serve millions of people and programmed
to operate internationally. It had
acquired a voice with which to
speak its answers, where before it
had offered only written responses. And it was deeply integrated
into the iPhone, so that it could
A customer
tries the
Siri voice
assistant
function on
an Apple
iPhone 5 in
Australia
during its
debut on
Sept. 21,
2012.
“A KINDER, GENTLER HAL
IS ON WAY ITS WAY TO THE
MAINSTREAM FOR SURE.”
tap into about a dozen of Apple’s
own tools to handle simple tasks
like scheduling a meeting, replying
to emails or checking the weather.
As impressive as those talents
were, most failed to realize that
Apple’s version of Siri lacked
many of the features once built
into the program. This, after all,
was no ordinary iPhone app, but
the progeny of the largest artificial
intelligence project in U.S. histo-