SIRI
RISING
saw virtually no limit to the routine transactions the assistant
could automate. They envisioned
Siri’s architecture allowing for
any web service with an API —
potentially hundreds of thousands
of them — to add its database to
the do engine.
But Siri’s creators also knew
their virtual assistant would only
succeed if it was both smart and a
smartass, both artificially intelligent and artificially amusing.
Kittlaus and Saddler brainstormed snappy comebacks for all
the offbeat questions people were
likely to ask the assistant. The
co-founders also dreamed of offering users a choice of different
personality “packs” that could be
installed to make Siri’s answers
sweeter or sassier. And because
Siri could recognize nuances in
users’ speech mannerisms, its creators hoped one day they might
even build a Siri that could mimic
people’s personalities. “Yo, yo what
kind of flicks are playing, dude?”
might get Siri to answer, “Hey man,
check out the new Eastwood flick.
Word,” according to Kittlaus.
In February 2010, three weeks
after Siri debuted as an independently developed iPhone app,
Kittlaus received a call from a
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
mystery number — one he nearly
missed thanks to a glitchy, unresponsive iPhone screen.
It was Steve Jobs and he wanted to meet. The next day.
Siri’s co-founders spent three
hours with Jobs at his Palo Alto
home discussing the future of do
engines and how people could
converse with machines (Jobs
loved Siri’s snark). Apple quickly
followed up with an interest in
acquiring the young company.
“The way that Steve described it,
speech recognition — and how to
use it to create a speech interface
for something like the iPhone —
was an area of interest to him and
Scott Forstall [then head of Apple’s
mobile software] for some time,”
recalls Kittlaus. “The story that
I’m told is that he thought we’d
cracked that paradigm with our
simple, conversational interface.”
Verizon thought so, too. In the
fall of 2009, several months before Apple approached Siri, Verizon had signed a deal with the
startup to make Siri a default
app on all Android phones set to
launch in the new year. When Apple swooped in to buy Siri, it insisted on making the assistant exclusive to Apple devices, and nixed
the Verizon deal. In the process,
it narrowly avoided seeing Siri
become a selling point for smartphones powered by its biggest