ARAYA DIAZ/GETTY IMAGES FOR TECHCRUNCH
SIRI
RISING
land are all among the institute’s
brainchildren.
The Menlo Park lab also gained
renown for counting, among its
researchers, Silicon Valley legend
Doug Engelbart, who in the 1960s
pioneered the computer mouse and
foresaw many of the basic computing tools we now take for granted.
Adam Cheyer, an engineer at the
institute, was already drawing comparisons to Engelbart, well before
he launched what would eventually become Siri. The dark-haired,
soft-spoken engineer — a one-time
Rubik’s Cube champion who could
solve the puzzle in just 26 seconds
— shared not only Engelbart’s ingenuity, but also his “people first”
approach to technology.
Engelbart maintained that machines should be used to augment
human intellect and capabilities.
The objective was “not trying to
replace humans in any respect,
but trying to have devices, hardware and software that make humans more effective at what they
already do,” explains Israel, who
remembers Cheyer and Engelbart
having lengthy discussions in the
research institute’s cafeteria.
Where other people saw chores
on a to-do list, Cheyer saw learning opportunities for virtual as-
HUFFINGTON
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sistants. During an earlier stint
at SRI in the 1990s, Cheyer, then
straight out of a master’s program
in computer science, built a small
army of prototype assistants.
Cheyer’s kitchen helper, for example, could track the contents of
his fridge and place grocery orders
online when milk ran low.
At SRI, Cheyer worked on assembling all the pieces produced
by the CALO project’s 27 teams
into a single assistant, which
was required to take an annual
exam testing what it had learned
over the course of the year. The
“research-grade” virtual assistant Cheyer helped build — also
called CALO — was still too rough
Siri cofounder
Adam Cheyer
arrives at the
5th Annual
Crunchies
Awards in
2012.