The
market vision that led to Siri, the virtual personal assistant that’s
now an integral part of Apple’s iPhone, can be traced back to 2003, when
a mobile phone’s primary applications were still limited to ringtones
and messaging. The author and his colleagues at SRI International
recognized that the phone’s growing capabilities would eventually put a
communicating supercomputer in everyone’s pocket. They believed that
their company was well suited to be a leader in the
inevitable technology and market revolution—as it had been in every
previous computing revolution. They didn’t originally plan to create a
stand-alone venture. They talked to dozens of telecom carriers and
handset providers, with the aim of jointly starting
a project that would license the technology. But because the few
resulting commercial projects implemented only small parts of its
original vision, the founding team decided to drop that idea and create
and build its own venture. Speech-to-text was the easy
part: SRI had launched Nuance, a world leader in speech solutions. The
hard part was analyzing words so as to understand the user’s intent and
then reason about and answer the request. The runaway success of Siri
demonstrates how well the team met that challenge.
[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]