SIRI
RISING
around the edges to be installed in
white-collar workers’ office PCs.
But CALO was capable of performing an impressive variety of
tasks that once seemed exclusive
to human assistants.
Say your colleague canceled
shortly before a meeting. CALO,
knowledgeable about each person’s role on a project, could discern whether to cancel the meeting, and if needed, reschedule,
issue new invitations and pin
down a conference room. If the
meeting went ahead as planned,
CALO could assemble (and rank)
all the documents and emails
you’d need to be up to speed on
the topic at hand. The assistant
would listen in on the meeting,
and, afterward, deliver a typed
transcript of who said what and
outline any specific tasks laid out
during the conversation. CALO
was also able to help put together
presentations, organize files into
folders, sort incoming messages
and automate expense reports,
among a host of other tasks.
Cheyer split his time between
training CALO and assisting SRI’s
Vanguard program, a parallel effort launched in 2003 to help
companies such as Deustche Telekom and Motorola probe the fu-
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
ture of a promising new gadget
called the smartphone. The Vanguard program developed its own
prototype assistant, more limited
than CALO, but more feasible.
The prototype dazzled a general
manager at Motorola by the name
of Dag Kittlaus.
A native mid-Westerner once
likened to a “baby-faced Nordic
Brad Pitt,” Kittlaus supplemented
his office routine with a daredevil’s diet of activities — chasing
tornadoes, jumping from planes
“SOME DAY SOON THE IPHONE
MAY BE REMEMBERED AS
A FOOTNOTE TO SIRI.”
and earning a black belt in Hapkido. He was a sci-fi buff partial to
authors like Arthur C. Clarke (who
helped pen the screenplay for
2001: A Space Odyssey) and would
later set out to write his own novel
set in the distant future.
When Kittlaus failed to persuade Motorola to adopt Vanguard’s technology, he quit the
company in 2007 for a position
as entrepreneur-in-residence at
SRI. Soon after, he found himself
on a plane to California for a retreat with Cheyer and several SRI
colleagues. Their mission for the