Apple Siri

Siri, or Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, is an intelligent personal assistant from the American company Apple Inc. The users interact with Siri via a natural language interface. Siri is able to search for data and answer questions based only on a vocal input. The underlying algorithms learn user's habits and personal language and better itself in order to deliver more individualized results.^[1] The user can invoke Siri by saying "Hey Siri" or by double-tapping the device's Home button.^[2]

Siri was originally developed by as an iOS app by a start-up company Siri, Inc. The aim was to offer a "virtual personal assistant technology" which would be a new way for the users to interact with their devices. The company was acquired by Apple, Inc. in 28 April 2010, and the app was integrated into the following version of iOS with the introduction of the iPhone4S.^[3]^[4]^[5]

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/01/23/a-look-at-the-history-of-siri-and-how-it-almost-became-an-android-exclusive-for-verizon/

Main characteristics

Siri uses natural language comprehension that processes the spoken information and then sends the query to be search, retrieve the data, and translate it back to spoken language to the user. The app itself does not conduct any search. The front-end merely consist of the Speex audio engine, that comprehends what the user is saying and sends the translated query to Apple servers. There, the user query is analysed and relevant information is retrieved from the database and the Internet.^[6] Siri is able to help the user with their task organization, text messaging, looking up services, social networks management, locating people, entertainment and more. It can directly interact with popular Internet services such as Facebook, Rotten Tomatoes, Wolfram Alpha, Yahoo Sports, as well as the Apple services ecosystem and the features present on the device Siri is installed on.^[7]

Siri does not de-construct sentences to discrete linguistic units but instead treats the key words as objects and searches for those.^[4]

Historical overview

Siri originally started as an iOS app created by a technology start-up if the same name. Siri, Inc. was founded by Dag Kittlaus, Tom Gruber, and Adam Cheyer in 2007.^[8]

The development of Siri begins with the United States Department of Defense funding of the SRI International, originally a part of the Stanford University as the Stanford Research Institute,^[9] five-year program to to develop a new artificial intelligence assistant that would help military commanders with their duties.^[10] This Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, or CALO in short, would learn the user's habits and learn to be more efficient in assisting them. The following excerpt from The Huffington Post describes CALO's abilities:

Say your colleague cancelled 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, afterwards, 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. - BOSKER, Biance, SIRI RISING: The Inside Story Of Siri's Origins -- And Why She Could Overshadow The iPhone, 22 January 2013, The Huffington Post^[4]

This project eventually inspired Adam Cheyer and former Motorola employee Dag Kittlaus to work on their own virtual assistant. Cheyer, Kittlaus, and several other SRI employees (Mark Drummond (then SRI's executive director of ventures and licensing), Norman Winarsky (vice president of SRI Ventures and a member of Siri's board), Didier Guzzoni (then Cheyer's Ph.D. student), Bill Mark (then vice president of SRI's information computing sciences division and a principal investigator for CALO) first envisioned the idea of Siri in 2007. They subsequently founded the Siri, Inc. company and secured funding from Morgenthaler and Menlo Ventures.^[11]^[12]

The development of Siri begun at a great speed.

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/04/28/apple-moves-deeper-into-voice-activated-search-with-siri-buy/

Gary Morgenthaler said in an interview for Tech Crunch that "Siri is the precursor to a revolution in search that provides far more intelligence in filtering results." This was in response to Eric Schmidt of Google defending Google's dominant position among the web search engines before the American Senate a year before. Siri was released for 3 weeks and was still considered to be in beta.^[13]

http://9to5mac.com/2011/11/10/meet-dag-kittlaus-the-guy-who-made-siri-and-became-a-millionaire-following-a-personal-phone-call-from-steve-jobs/

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/06/14/the-story-of-siri-from-birth-at-sri-to-acquisition-by-apple-virtual-personal-assistants-go-mobile/?single_page=true

http://www.novaspivack.com/technology/how-hisiri-works-interview-with-tom-gruber-cto-of-siri

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac-software/siri-for-mac-launch-date-os-x-wwdc-3536158/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/story-behind-siri-man-who-made-her-danielle-newnham