Skip to main content

The Story Behind Siri, Its Name and Founder

Since Apple’s iPhone 4S launch, everyone has been talking about one awesome feature: Siri. Unlike Apple’s own innovations, Siri – the digital personal assistant wasn’t made by Apple.

Siri was founded in 2007 by Dag Kittlaus (CEO), Adam Cheyer (VP Engineering) and Tom Gruber (CTO/VP Design). Siri was originally developed as an iOS application available in the App Store and later acquired by Apple on April 28, 2010. It is now integrated part of iOS 5 and available only on iPhone 4S (taken from Wikipedia).

 

image

 

As per e24 article, Siri’s CEO Dag Kittlaus’s life (picture above) took a turn for the better following a special phone call from Steve Jobs last year. Dag recalls -

“Of course it was a great moment when Steve Jobs called and wanted to buy my company. It was surreal. When I heard that it was him, I knew we had made it big. In advance, we were pretty confident that the technology we had developed was so startling that we would get some kind of breakthrough. Steve was the first caller.”

Siri in Norwegian means “beautiful victorious counselor”. Dag named the Siri app after the famous Norwegian meteorologist and business woman Siri Kalvig, with whom he had worked during his tenure at Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company, while she worked for meteorologist company Storm.

In reality, Dag wanted to name his daughter Siri, but he got son so he instead named his company Siri .“Our first child was going to be named Siri, but then we got Markus”.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Your Google Apps Account is Changing

Google is about to make more of its services available to organizations with Google Apps accounts. This is an early adopter phase, and all domains may not get this option to move to the new infrastructure. What this means for you: In addition to the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications, Google Apps users may now access many more Google services with their Google Apps accounts.     Those who are eligible for this early adoption, Google Apps administrator will be presented with the above banner to start with the migration. In your organization, you can transition selected pilot users and admins, or you can start the transition now for all your users. The transition for pilot users can be reverted if necessary. After successful transition, your users will now be able to use other Google popular products like AdSense, AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, Android, Blogger, Finance, Google Desktop, News, Orkut, Reader, Voice, YouTube (Full list here ). Als...
Post a Comment
Read more

Windows Phone 7.5 Tango Officially Renamed As ‘Refresh’

The next version of Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system after Mango 7.1 is officially renamed as ‘Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh’ – according to the head of Windows Phone division for Microsoft Italy.     According to Italian version of the post , 7.5 Refresh update will mostly be an update to the minimum specs of the devices it’ll be able to run (minimum RAM requirements is dropped from 512 MB to 256 MB). Other updates which may include in this release are better media messaging, location awareness icon, export and manage contacts to SIM card. The next major update after ‘Refresh’ is called Windows Phone Apollo (probably Windows Phone 8) could certainly be an exciting release from Microsoft. This Apollo update may have BitLocker kind of support on mobile devices, multi-core support. [ via ] [ Image ]
Post a Comment
Read more

Google Wallet: The Future Innovative Mobile Payments

Earlier few months, Google unveiled future innovative way of payment technology – Google Wallet. Today, Google released its first version of the Android app with Sprint Nexus S 4G phones through an over the air update. Google Wallet is an app that lets you pay for things using your phone, either by tying your credit card or gift or pre-paid cards. It works using an near field communication (NFC) embedded chip and there is no swiping required.   According to Techcrunch , Google Wallet will not work everywhere your credit card will. It won’t work everywhere there’s an NFC-friendly card reader, either. Wallet requires an NFC reader based on a new-ish specification, and only a select bunch of retailers have gotten around to updating. The post also had some great review and walkthrough in real life. This app is now available to Samsung Nexus S owners on Sprint, through PayPass sensors at Radio Shack, Foot Locker, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Sunoco, CVS/pharmacy, etc. retailers. ...
Post a Comment
Read more