SIRI
RISING
within the company.
Only one of Siri’s three cofounders, Tom Gruber, remains at
the company. Kittlaus left three
weeks after Apple re-launched
Siri in 2011, and Cheyer quit a
year later. Apple’s Forstall, who
introduced Siri at its first keynote and oversaw the company’s
iOS software, was fired last year.
Steve Jobs died the day after Siri
debuted. And Luc Julia, who replaced Kittlaus as head of Siri,
lasted just 10 months at Apple
before leaving in 2012.
A HIGHER STATE OF BEING
Siri offered the first mass-market
assistant capable of understanding humans’ natural speech patterns and assembling information
from disparate parts of the into
a single, correct response. That
model, one Siri pioneered, has
been embraced by a growing wave
of artificial intelligence engineers
and entrepreneurs keen to pioneer
their own version of HAL.
The virtual assistants now coming to market are trying to provide
many of the same capabilities offered in the early version of Siri,
and CALO before it. Even Apple
has been slowly reinstating some
of the capabilities Siri once of-
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
fered, such as movie reviews and
restaurant bookings.
Having seen Siri’s success, Silicon Valley startups are now mining the CALO project to build a
race of assistants tailored to work
in specialized fields. Desti is an
artificially intelligent assistant
specializing in travel; Lola is a
“Siri for banking;” and Kuato is
leveraging CALO research to build
a learning assistant.
More than half a dozen Sirilike services launched in 2012
alone. Samsung debuted S-Voice,
a voice-controlled assistant. Nuance, a provider of speech recognition software, released a “Siri for
apps” called Nina. Startups Evi
and Maluuba each released virtual
assistant apps. IBM is working on
adapting its supercomputer Watson into a turbo-charged Siri that
can help physicians, farmers, Wall
Street traders and high-schoolers.
And Google has followed Siri with
its own conversational assistant,
Google Now.
“The idea is not to ask one
question and get an answer, but
to have the assistant proceed with
me in a conversation and go and
do things for me,” says Scott Huffman, an engineering director who
oversees Google’s mobile search
efforts. It’s a vision that sounds
remarkably like the one Siri’s
founders first embraced.