Siri: The First 40 Years

In different times, Siri could just be the name of another Malawi child adopted by Madonna or Angelina and splashed on the cover of magazines wearing little designer jeans riding in a Land Rover car seat.  Not this Siri.  Although our Siri had humble roots and is also now in the hands of deep-pocked famous parents, she has a complex family tree that actually goes back several decades and includes some of the best upbringing and education money can buy. 

Today, Siri is almost 43 years old, yet in most ways really an infant.  Now that lady's older voice starts to make more sense....

Seeing the Forest through the Family Trees
Siri was actually born long before Apple adopted her last year for $200 million.  Her birth parents are in some ways really an amalgamation of top inventors, researchers, universities as well as organizations like SRI, NASA and ARPA.

It really takes a village to raise a future digital personal assistant.

Dad in 1968

But some would say that she was really born on December 9, 1968 when her virtual father, inventor Douglas Engelbart, introduced her roots at a small computer conference in San Francisco. That memorable 90-minute presentation (original flyer to the right) was not focused on Siri as she is today, but instead showcased the concepts which have shaped how we interface and interact with computers today.  Looking now more like an old newsreel of a TomorrowLand exhibit at DisneyWorld, it was also the first public demonstration of the computer mouse (later licensed to Apple for $40,000).  It was also the debut of other key innovations in use today such as hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking.

Siri was essentially formed that day within those proof of concepts and spent the following years in obscurity as those same ideas helped build out the hardware and software she would someday need to flourish.  Engelbart's focus at that time was on how computers could augment tasks and solve problems for humans.  He continues that goal even today.  At the time this involved various input devices, but actual voice recognition was still far off.

Considering that there was no internet at the time, Engelbart and his team were true pioneers and were formulating the ideas that would be needed to later harness the massive amounts of data that would be available decades later - via the web and subsequently on mobil devices.  That future would end up being Siri's real calling and formally launch her into the limelight almost four decades later.

The Student becomes the Teacher
Fast forward to around 2003, when The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awards a five year project to SRI to "revolutionize how computers support decision-makers" using a personal assistant approach. This project was part of DARPA's PAL project (Perceptive Assistant that Learns)  and was visioned as a way to help the military better manage multiple information sources  within their command-and-control environments.

CALO

That project became CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) within SRI and thus began Siri's re-birth as the project searched for ways to gather and maintain information in a learning-based environment.  The teams on CALO included some of the best AI scientists, including researchers from Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon.  Not a bad set of teachers for their budding new student, Siri.  But she was not just ready to come out just yet.

After a few years as the DARPA interest in the project waned, SRI began to look at the commercialization of the technology coming out of the CALO project. With the recent advent of the growing mobil market, the project was combined with another SRI project called Vanguard which looked to enhance the ease of use of data services.  These data services were predicted to overtake the declining voice services market within the telephony industry - how right they were.

So Siri's official launching pad was set – a digital assistant to make using the burgeoning data services sector easier to navigate and use.

I'm Sorry HAL, I'm Afraid We Can't Do That
This new combined team at SRI was now working on the technology it internally called HAL. Yes, that HAL from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  That was changed soon after however, owing in part to the fictional computers tendency toward homicide, to the more sedate "Active Technologies".

As part of the spinoff plan, a venture firm was called in and began the process of raising funding for the new company, to be called "Siri", a nod to her birth place.  In October of 2008, Siri, Inc. raised $8.5 million and in 2009 another $15.5 million.  That’s now $24M towards her upbringing plus the $150 million plus of taxpayer money already invested at SRI.

The Apple of her Eye
Siri began making the rounds being shown at computer conferences and the advent of the smartphone helped give more form to her function.  Interestingly, Vlingo was initially used as the speech recognition engine when first built, prior to the eventual switch to Nuance (the VR part could be changed again if needed). The Apple iPhone 3GS was used as the mobile platform to launch the first app of Siri on February 4, 2010. Within three short months, she was quickly adopted by her current parents - Apple.  She was bought for somewhere estimated around $200 million and when added to the initial costs of her upbringing, bring the tab easily over the half a billion mark. The original Siri app was eventually put on ice as the technology was re-worked into the iPhone's base architecture.

Siri's future is now in the hands of Apple with many of the same development team who raised her alongside her now as Apple employees.  Her recent debut on the iPhone 4S have some convinced the "S" is for Siri, as she has the potential to dramatically change how we use technology once again – just what she set out to do over 40 years ago.

Her parents sure think she can.  They should know.