The Siri Story: Joining Apple

th eleven. If you haven't listened to the previous episode, I recommend you do that, as I covered a lot of the backstory to SIRI, as well as some of the technical challenges engineers faced as they built on the underlying technologies that you know makes SIRIE a possibility in the first place. However, I will do a super quick

summary of the important points just in case. So SIRIE really started off as an offshoot of a Department of Defense funded project to create a virtual assistant that military

commanders would be able to rely upon. S r I International, a nonprofit scientific research organization, landed the contract and ultimately would spin off a company called SIRI s I r I that would explore how to take a subset of the technologies that were developed for this Department of Defense project and then use it in the consumer market with an eye on mobile devices. Now, that was in two thousand seven, just as consumer smartphones were becoming a thing,

primarily with of course, the Apple iPhone. By the company had a working app that they submitted to the Apple App Store, and a few weeks later, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called up Dog Kittlause, the head of Sirie, to talk about the app and ultimately to make an acquisition offer, which the company ultimately accepted. A year later, and one day before Steve Jobs's death, Apple would unveil Siri as an Apple product, though as we know, the bulk of

the work on Siri had been done elsewhere. Now that's the super fast summary of the actually really interesting backstory on Sirie. You can listen to the previous episode to get the full thing. But we've got a few other things to clear up before we can continue down the

path of series development. As I mentioned in the previous episode, Sirie, the company before Apple's acquisition, had arranged a deal with the cell phone carrier company Verizon, and the deal was that Siri was going to create an Android app version of its service that would be a flagship feature on Verizon Android phones. And this is a good time to point out one of the major differences between Apple and Android. Apple only allows iOS, you know, the operating system of

the iPhone and the iPad and stuff like that. They only allow that to run on Apple products. So if you want an iPhone or something running the iPhone operating system, you have to go through Apple. I mean, you could try to make some other device run iOS on top of that device, but my point is that if you want the real thing, you have to go to Apple. There's nowhere else to go. Google when a totally different route.

They built out Android, and they made it available for installation on all different types of handsets from different companies, and so you had a lot of flavors of Android. And I'm not just referring to the fact that Google uses dessert names for various versions of Android. What I actually mean is that you could find one handset manufacturer that would preinstall a certain suite of apps on their phones, or a cell phone service provider like Verizon might do

the same thing. So while you could shop around with different handsets and providers for an Android phone, the versions might look a little different and have different flagship apps on the home page. In some cases, you might come across a lot of bloatwear. Now those are apps that you don't really want or maybe you never even use them, but they're pre installed and sometimes they're impossible to remove

from the phone without going to some pretty big effort. Anyway, Verizon wanted Sirie to be an intrinsic app on the Android smartphones moving forward, essentially making siri uh an Android feature the way it would turn out to be an iPhone feature. So Verizon and Sirie began making arrangements in the fall of two thousand nine, but Verizon did not actually acquire Sirie the company. If it had, our story

would be very different. Verizon reportedly planned to make Srie exclusive to Android, but the companies were doing this through a planned partnership, and during the meanwhile, there just was no exclusivity in place, so Sirie the company continued to develop Sirie the app for the iPhone. The app debut a few months after the Verizon deal, and that you know was that A couple of weeks later, Steve Jobs was calling up kit Loss to talk about bringing SyRI

on board Apple as an acquisition. And Apple doesn't typically acquire that many companies, so this was kind of a big deal. That acquisition would take a few months to complete, and business journals reported on it around April. The financial details of the deal were not made public. Business insider analysts estimated that the deal may have fallen somewhere in the one hundred to two hundred million dollar range, which

is a princely sum. Indeed, they based that off the fact that Siri had successfully raised twenty four million dollars and invest monts up to that point. Now, one of the conditions of this acquisition was that Sirie was going

to be an Apple exclusive feature. It would be baked into the basic functionality of iOS moving forward, and a consequence of this is that the Verizon deal that Siri had made would be null and void and Siri would go dark for more than a year as Apple would bring the serie team over to Cupertino at Apple HQ and then began making some pretty big changes to the app in order to integrate it more closely with iOS.

Not all of those tweaks were additions. For example, the original Sirie app, the one that could still make some pretty sassy responses to requests, could make restaurant reservations on behalf of the user. When Apple would debut Siri as an integral iOS feature, it would not have that capability, though the service would eventually get the feature back by two thousand twelve. My point being that some of the changes that Apple was making was to remove functionality from Siri.

The serie team had worked to secure agreements with various other services which allowed Sirie the app to interoperate with those services. But those agreements were, you know, with a much smaller, nimble and private company, right, Siri was this tiny, entiteam. Once Apple entered the picture, all of that changed. Apple is Well, let's say that Apple is particular in how its technology can interact with stuff that is made by

other companies. Not all of those earlier relationships that Sirie had made when it was an independent company would survive the transition over winds SII became part of Apple. On top of that, Apple's focus was much more broad than

series focus had been. I mentioned in the previous episode that the discipline of natural language processing, that is, trying to make systems that can handle the way we typically speak or communicate with one another, as opposed to us having to learn how to speak in a way that a computer can, you know, follow what we're saying. Well, anyway, it's particularly tricky because we humans have different ways to express things, and none of them tend to be in

the way that machines process information. And one of the big complicating factors that I mentioned in our previous episode is that there are thousands of languages and it's hard to develop programs that have good natural language processing for a single language like English, but it becomes exponentially more difficult as you try to support additional languages, each with their own peculiarities. Apple, a global company, was selling iPhones

in more than seventy countries at that point. For Siri to be a flagship feature would be across all those phones. It would need to be able to respond to a lot of different languages. Now, upon its initial release as an Apple feature, Siri would just be limited to English, French, and German, but it had the goal of expanding those

capabilities to other languages as well. Building in that capability would take a lot of effort and time, and so while the serie team might have been able to go on deeper dives and you know, give Sirie more incredible abilities, a lot of their work had to shift towards localization. And this is not meant to be a knock against Sirie or Apple. It's just an acknowledgement that the job of the designers was really challenging and there were only so many hours in a day to make it all work.

So the acquisition happened. In April twenty ten, the Verizon deal died as a result. The serie team moved to Cupertino, California, and a lot of work was being done behind in the scenes now At the same time, Steve Jobs's health was on the decline. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer back in two thousand four. In two thousand nine, he had temporarily stepped down as CEO to recover from what he originally reported as a hormone imbalance, though it

was later revealed he had undergone a liver transplant. Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer at the time, would take over as sort of an interim CEO, and then Jobs returned to work six months later. Jobs was leading the company when he made the move to acquire Sirie, but he would subsequently suffer more health setbacks. In January eleven, Jobs would again take medical leave from Apple, but he would continue to Services CEO. During his leave, Cook would take

over the day to day operations of the company. Jobs would then take the stage one final time during the two thousand eleven Worldwide Developed First Conference or w w d C that took place from June six to June tenth,

two thousand eleven. He received a standing ovation from the crowd before going into the introduction for the week's events, and at that event, he talked about the new versions of the Apple Mac operating system as well as the latest build of iOS, but SIRIE was not quite ready to debut, and so there was no mention of the innovative service that was going to be reserved for October. While the serie team prepared for the official debut of SIRIE as an Apple feature, Jobs had to make a

tough call. On August twenty four, two thousand eleven, Steve Jobs resigned as Chief executive Officer of Apple. Tim Cook would become the new CEO of the company. Jobs's health had declined to a point where he felt he could no longer devote energy to running the company that he had co founded back in the ninetees seventies, and there was a lot of speculation at the time that Apple

might fall apart without him. After all, when Jobs had left Apple in the mid nineteen eighties, the company went on to make some pretty awful mistakes that would lead it to the brink of bankruptcy. And when Jobs returned to Apple in the late nineteen nineties, he would lead the company to turn things around and then reach a dominant position that no other company had really seen before

in the consumer marketplace. Steve Jobs seemed integral to the corporate identity of Apple, kind of the same way that you know, Walt Disney seems inseparable from the Disney Company. So people would still say, you know, what would Walt do well? A lot of people would say at Apple, what would Steve Jobs do well. In October four, two thousand and eleven, Apple would hold a press conference to launch the iPhone for S. This was technically the fifth iPhone,

following the original iPhone. Then we had the three G so the iPhone two was the three g UM. There's reasons for all these numbers and why they are kind of confusing, but I won't go into all of them. Anyway. After the three G we got the three G S. Then we got the iPhone four and that's all because numbers are hard. But to be more fair to Apple, the iPhone four S would end up bridging a gap between the older iPhone four and the future iPhone five.

The iPhone four S looked a lot like the iPhone four, but it did have several hardware improvements, including a faster processor, and it also had something that Apple said justified adding the letter S to the phone it had, Siri. At the October fourth event, which was just called a special event, Tim Cook took the stage for the first time as

CEO to announce a product launch. He handed the presentation over to Phil Schiller, who had frequently stood in for Steve Jobs at various keynotes during jobs as leaves of absence, and Schiller, in turn would bring up Scott Forstall, head

of iOS. Shortly after announcing Sirie and Forestall would give the audience an overview of series capabilities a demo of them, as well as well as stress multiple times that Siri was in beta mode and just in case you don't know what that means, a beta build is a stage in development where you're trying to refine a product before you get to the point where you you know you

you release it. And so if you have an alpha build, that's really more of a work in progress, and it's one that could have potentially enormous changes made to the product before it ever goes to production. So really you're just trying to make stuff work in alpha. A beta build is meant to be one that's fairly close to what a company plans to release, but it may still need some tweak to make it work just right. So you can think of a beta build as being like

almost ready. And Apple doesn't typically allow people to get a look at stuff that's in beta. The company has a history of locking things down pretty tightly before showing it off. So perhaps the fact that this was an exception points at how Series integration into iOS didn't go without some setbacks. Now, all that being said, the demo at this special event went off without a hitch. Siri didn't make any embarrassing mistakes and interpreted Forstall's requests correctly.

It retrieved relevant information, it didn't have to ask for Stall to repeat anything, and it also didn't sass back the personal assistant with an attitude had been toned down significantly. Siri was ready for its journey with Apple. I've got a lot more to say about Sirie, but before I

get to that, let's take a quick break. At the special event, Scott Forstall would walk through some of the initial capabilities Siri would have with the launch of the new iPhone for s That included looking up information on Wikipedia, or providing directions to a landmark, or looking up restaurant options that are near you, and that kind of thing, including a really neat geo fencing feature. Geo fencing involves location data. Essentially, you create an instruction that's dependent upon

your physical location on the planet. So you might say, remind me when I leave the house to swing by the post office to your virtual assistant. Now that command would then have to be interpreted by the assistants system. So if it were Sirie, Siri would monitor your phone's location and if your phone indicated that it was leaving the area generally known as being home, Siri would then send a push notification to the phone to remind you

that you need to go to the post office. Geo fencing is one of those features I think is really neat, and yet I don't actually make that much use out of it. But maybe I'm the odd one out do you guys use a lot of geo fencing features. I remember I looked at them as the possibility of setting them up so when I was in the office, I would get fewer notifications, for example, But I never really got to do what I was hoping it would do.

And I don't know if that was a failure on the part of the technology or more likely user failure. So if you guys have a lot of, you know, experience doing geo fencing type stuff, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. Anyway, the presentation went pretty well. People seemed interested in SIRIE. However, I would say this wasn't the sort of reaction that really makes it into clip montages or anything. You didn't see, you know, people losing their minds over the the implications of SIRIE. But it

was definitely positive. It wasn't like a clunker or anything. I'm just not sure how many people grasped how complicated the accomplishment actually was. It didn't really get how hard these problems were to solve in the back end. Now, one other thing they likely did not grasp is that Siri didn't actually start out as an Apple product, which we know because of the episodes I've just done. But during that presentation there really wasn't an indication that it

was from some other developer. You would walk away thinking that Apple developed the whole thing in full at Apple HQ, although that wasn't the case now. As I mentioned, this event happened on October four, two thousand eleven, and the following day, on October five, Steve Jobs passed away. Understandably, that piece of news eclipsed all other Apple news that week. Heck it it eclipse pretty much all tech news that week. Jobs had been a pivotal figure in the world of

technology in general and Silicon Valley in particular. Under his leadership, Apple had gone from teetering on bankruptcy to a company that was defining the next generation of hardware with products like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. His loss was felt around the world, and Sirie perhaps got a little less attention as a result. The iPhone Forest would

go on sale the following week, on October four. Within the first weekend of sales, Apple would sell more than four million units, which meant that the iPhone Forest broke previous records of the fastest selling product ever at that point. And about a week after that, Kit Loss Dog kit Loss, one of the co founders of Sirie the Company, would leave Apple Now. According to reports, the parting was on good terms, it was amicable, and it was one that Dog had been preparing for over the second half of

two thousand all eleven. He said he wanted to spend more time with his family, and they were living in Chicago than For those of you who are not familiar with US geography, Chicago, Illinois is about two thousand, one fifty miles or three thousand, four hundred sixty kilometers away

from Cupertino, California. It is not close. He also wanted to pursue new entrepreneurial opportunities, so his initial motivation was to get Sirie the Company up and running, and that had turned out to be a huge success, so he was ready to move on to a new challenge. One thing I haven't really talked about in these episodes, however, is series voice, and I feel like I should at least touch on that. So the original voices for Sirie came from clips of audio that were recorded by a

voice actor named Susan Bennett. And when I say original voice, I mean the American English voice of Sirie and Bennett actually lived in Atlanta at the time. I have no idea if she still does. But when she made the recordings she did, and here's the kicker, she didn't even know she was going to be the voice of Syrie. She landed a gig through a voice acting service called GM Voices kind of like a talent agency for voice over actors, and they specialize in finding voice talent to

provide audio clips for various automated services. Typically a company called scan Soft wanted a voice actor to say a ton of phrases, mostly nonsense stuff that made you know, no real connective tissue sense or anything. And they wanted to make all these different words sounds to build out a computerized speech database, essentially to build out the building blocks for American English speech, all the little phonemes that make up the sounds that then in turn makeup the

spoken word. Scan Soft took the recorded audio and broke it down into those different based phonemes of English, and through a process called concatenation, which is simply means that that you're stringing together units to make a whole, they could construct speech that way, taking all the little basic sounds and making up words and sentences that way. During development, the serie team turned to a company called Nuance for

technologies related to voice generation and speech recognition. Nuance had merged with scan Soft, and so Bennett's voice, which she had recorded way back in two thousand five, was in nuances speech database tool set, and someone on the project, either at Sirie or at Nuance, chose Bennett's voice for the Sirie app and that would make the leap over to Apple when Sirie the company was acquired, and so in October two thousand eleven, six years after she had

made the original recordings, she would unknowingly become the voice of Sirie. Over in the UK, John Briggs would become the first British male voice for Sirie, and down under Karen Jacobson would become the Ausee Serie and series voice. Or voices I guess I should say would change a few times, once in with the introduction of iOS seven, and it changed again in twenty nineteen with the introduction of iOS thirteen, but in each case the goal was

to move towards a more natural tone and delivery. As the state of the art in voice generation improved and became less robotic. If you listen to those early examples of Siri, it does get a little robotic in places. Back in eleven series, speech was pretty good, but it wasn't perfect, and occasionally Siri would mispronounce something as it would use one set of phone emes instead of another.

And it actually makes me think of a joke in the show The Play that Goes Wrong Uh, in which the characters of the show are putting on a play and one of the actors has a tendency to mispronounce words, so in one example, he pronounces the word philanthropist as philanthropist, And that sort of thing could happen with Syria on occasion where there would just be a string of sounds to represent a word, but it would be slightly wrong,

and it would often just be funny. Upon the features debut with the iPhone for US, Sirie received some fairly positive reviews. Over at Wired, Brian x Chen wrote, quote the fifth generation iPhones, superb camera and speedy dual core processor are classy additions, but Siri is the reason people

should buy this phone end quote. Chen praised the apps utility, pointing out that it took less time for him to do certain tasks using Siri than it would have if he had to use his phone and type things in manually. He also praised the versatility of the app, including its ability to interpret a fairly wide range of commands and return with relevant responses, and the positive comments didn't stop there. Others praise the app for having what appeared to be

a wry sense of humor. Hailey Suka Yama. The Washington Post actually collected a few examples of people attempting to be a little cheeky with Siri and how the assistant would often respond in kind, though not with the sort of foul language of the original Sirie app from back in so For example, when Jason Snell of Macworld asked Sirie what was the meaning of life, the universe, and everything,

Sirie didn't hesitate. Siri responded with forty two, of course, which is a reference to the classic sci fi comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The Harvard Business Review proclaimed that Siri quote is as revolutionary as the mac end quote, which is a pretty grand statement. The journal pointed out that Sirie represented a real step forward and creating a natural language interface for computers. For decades, computer users had to learn how best to use computers.

We had to learn how to use a mouse and a keyboard. We had to learn how to navigate file systems and hunt down programs and type things in in a way that a computer could process it. But Siri represented a big change in that dynamic. With a system like Sirie, you could potentially interact with a computer in a much more natural way. The machine would learn how to work best with you, not the other way around. It would be like the computers in Star Trek the

next generation. You could speak out what it was you wanted to do. The computer would then interpret it and do whatever it was you were asking. And this change in interfaces could open up a lot of opportunities for people who might find it difficult or even impossible to interact with computers using the more traditional mouse and keyboard approach, or touch screens for that matter. Having something like Siri as an alternative to these other interfaces would improve accessibility.

And that's own that's no small thing. That's not to be dismissed. There are millions of people who either cannot fully take advantage of technology or they have to go to much greater efforts to access it due to challenges like vision impairments or mobility issues, and systems like Siri could potentially help people gain a higher level of autonomy. Of course, with SIRIE, that process was a bit more complicated on the back end than you might otherwise imagine.

The phone wasn't really doing all or even most of the work for SIRIE. The voice input was being recorded. That audio clip would then be sent to a remote server, which would analyze the voice recording, you know, and and transcribe it. Other servers would activate to pull relevant information from whatever sources were needed, and then that information would make its way back to the end users phone and

series response. So to the user, it seems like the phone is doing all the work for you, but in reality, the phone is more like a conduit and there's a sophisticated network of computers that we're doing the heavy lifting in the background. The reason I even mentioned that is because it's really good to remember the power that sits

behind stuff like Siri. It's a pretty big jump to go from a relatively thin device that is sending data to a large system that's behind the scenes, and then make that move to a standalone computer that can interact with a person through natural language. The fact that most of us aren't interfacing with our electronics through voice might be an indicator that this is still a pretty hard problem to solve, even when we have a story as

successful as Siri. Although that success is you know, it's not it's not a total success, as we will learn as we go on. Uh So, Yeah, the phrase success story is a little dangerous to use because it's important to acknowledge that not everyone was thrilled with the apps performance. In the spring of twelve, a group of Apple customers

began to file lawsuits against the company. They would have ultimately become a class action lawsuit, and the lawsuit alleged that the plaintiffs had been falsely advertised to regarding series capabilities. Apple had released a bunch of different commercials that were showcasing what Siri should be able to do, and these people were saying, Sirie doesn't do that, or at least it doesn't do it the way you said it does,

so that became the crux of this lawsuit. They complained that reality was falling far short of what had been promised. Apple's response to the lawsuits was understandable, but also a little bit caddy. Not that I'm judging, but it just comes across kind of that way. So here's an excerpt from Apple's response to the complaints, as was reported on

by the Wall Street Journal. Quote they and the thing in this case means the plaintiffs offer only general descriptions of Apple's advertisements, in complete summaries of Apple's website materials, and vague descriptions of their alleged and highly individualized disappointment with Sirie Telling Lee. Although plaintiff's claim they became dissatisfied with Series performance soon after purchasing their iPhones, they made no attempt to avail themselves of Apple's thirty day return

policy or one year warranty, which remains in effect. Instead, they seek to take an alleged personal grievance about the purported performance of a popular product and turn it into a nationwide class action under California's consumer protection statutes. The complaint does not come close to meeting the heavy burden

necessary to sustain such claims end quote. Now, judges would subsequently agree with Apple that the plaintiffs claims really lacked specificity and they were just too vague to constitute a valid argument. As a result, the class action lawsuit would be dismissed in and again in But this would not be the only case of legal trouble, and Sirie will

touch on that again a little bit later. But when we come back, we'll talk about when some other members of the original serie team took their leave from Apple. But first let's take a quick break. By late spring, Series Shine was starting to wear off a little bit after its debut. The journal nine to five MAC, dedicated to All Things Apple, ran a survey that found of those who responded said that Sirie needed a bit more

were but overall was helpful. So they saw the potential, but they agreed that it needed a little more time in the oven now. To be fair to Apple, for Stall had stressed at the October event that Sirie was still in beta. He said it a few times, so the company was certainly aware that while the tool was really interesting and had a lot of potential, it was not perfect. Whether consumers were unaware of the caveats that Forestall had made, or their expectations were just ultra high

due to Apple's string of monumental successes. Some folks ended up being a little less impressed than others. In September twenty twelve, tech journalists reported that Adam Share, another co founder of the serie company, had left Apple. Actually he had departed Apple in June of but wasn't reported until September. He had been serving as an engineer director for iOS. He left the company to quote pursue other projects end quote. One of those projects was change dot org, the site

that allows people to create and distribute various petitions. Another project was viv Labs, which Samsung would later acquire and which also centered around the voice assistant features. And he also occasionally performs magic, you know, like in stadium shows and for Penn and Teller that's not a joke. He is a literal magician. Outside of a relatively small text circle, not a lot of folks really knew about him in his role of developing Sirie, however, and so I'm not

sure that many people registered his departure. It wasn't like the general public associated Sirie with a specific real life person. Another person who did leave Apple around that time, and also not this time, not by choice, was Scott Forstall. That was the man who had introduced Siri at that Apple special event in October two thousand and eleven, he had headed up iOS. But a year later in October, Apple announced that four Sol would be leaving the company

by the end of the year. And in this case, we kind of know what was going on that led to four Stalls departure. So when Syrie debuted, it was with the iPhone four S and iOS five. The next build of iOS, which thank goodness, was just called iOS six, came with a very nasty albatross around its metaphorical neck, and that albatross was Apple Maps. Now you may, oh, my Drew Gees have forgotten what a mess Apple Maps was when it first came out, So let me remind you.

At the time Apple was cutting ties with Google, the Android operating system was beginning to get some real traction, and Google's strategy to aim at more moderate markets than Apple's prestige products allowed Android to get a big user base pretty quickly. One thing Apple did in response was to give Google Maps the boot off of iOS. It would eventually come back, but Apple famously said, nope, We're gonna disable that functionality and replace it with Apple Maps only.

The trouble was that Apple Maps wasn't as reliable as Google Maps, and Google Maps wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but Apple Maps was notably worse. Apple's version wasn't as detailed as Google Maps and didn't have some of the information that Google included in its applications. So, for example, if you were visiting a new city, you could use Google Maps to see how to take public transit to get around town. Apple Maps did not have

that functionality when it launched. Worse than that, for some cities, particularly cities outside of the United States, major landmarks would be mislabeled or would appear in the wrong location on a map. It just wasn't good. Apple would ultimately issue an apology, which is a huge thing. I mean, Apple just doesn't do that typically. I mean it was a really rare move for the company to make, but for

Stall refused to sign the apology. Essentially, he wasn't admitting any accountability for the failures of iOS six and Apple Maps in particular. Tim Cook would fire Forestall partly because of that and for a few other reasons. Tim Cook said he wanted a harmonious workplace, which implied that Forstall was not the easiest person to work with, and also that he wanted a workplace without politics, also implying that Forrestall perhaps was playing the little politics in the office

as well. There were some who argued that Forrestall was likely to claim credit where perhaps he wasn't fully justified in doing so. I don't know if any of that is true, but that's kind of the reporting around it. For Stall wasn't one of series founders. He rather was sort of the liaison between the serie team and the public once Serrie made the move to Apple, because Forestall was overseeing iOS in general. Tom Gruber, the third co founder,

would actually stick with Apple for several more years. He was the last one to remain with the company, the other two co founders had already left. He would retire in ten to pursue his interests, which included ocean conservation and photography. But let's get back to twelve. As Apple continued to change and adjust to a post Steve Jobs world, other companies began to bring products out in an attempt

to compete with Sirie. Google had its own virtual assistant, which sort of grew out of a voice to text search feature. It would eventually be known as Google Assistant, and Samsung brought out the s Voice Assistant. Amazon would introduce Alexa in that's the same year that Microsoft would bring its voice assistant Cortana to Windows. Though these days I think Alexa, Syrie, and Google Assistant are really the three best known virtual assistance. I think Alexa has the

clear edge on the other two. Cortana has seen a lot of quote unquote her functionality reduced since twenty nineteen. Microsoft is kind of removed a lot of Cortana's features.

Apparently the deep integration into Windows just didn't work out, and that kind of comes back to Apple to One of the big criticisms about SIRIE was that once Apple brought it on board, once they acquired the company, Apple made a lot of decisions that ultimately either reduced series functionality or cut it off from growing the way it

could have otherwise. Before Sirie moved over to Apple, the team was hard at work integrating the assistance functionality with a whole suite of apps from different developers, and ideally you would reach a point where you could just tell your device what you wanted and the assistant would work out the rest, pulling information or accessing whatever apps are necessary. In order to do the thing you wanted it to do.

In fact, you can imagine an implementation of this in which the assistant could even compare different ways to accomplish the same task you give it and then go with whatever is the best option. So let me give you an example. Since the start of the pandemic, I've been staying at home, and on occasion I will order food from a nearby restaurant for delivery. You'll get a craving and I'll say, all right, I want to eat such and such, so I'm gonna order from so and so.

Only not every restaurant works with every delivery service, right, So that kind of means that I have to make accounts with all these different services like Postmates or door Dash or grub Hub, or here in Atlanta we have one called zifty. You get the point. And then let's say I get a craving for some amazing Thai food and I have a specific restaurant I have in mind. I have to figure out which of the services works

with that restaurant, right uh. And if more than one of the services works with the restaurant, I might even want to compare them to find out who's gonna get me the food the quickest, or who's going to do it the cheapest, like who's gonna have the lowest service fees. So in an ideal implementation of a virtual assistant, the assistant would do all of that work for me. It would compare the different options, and it might give me

an informed choice. You know, maybe I just tell the assistant that I just want the food and I wanted as fast as possible, and that's what matters to me. So just find the services going to get it here the fastest based on their estimations. Or maybe I might say, you know what, money's tight, I want the least expensive way to get that order here, and so on. But now expand that single use case across us, all apps and all potential uses of the assistant, and you see

where it could really come in handy. Now, I'm not the worst when it comes to installing tons of apps on my phone and then forgetting about them and never using them. But I'm not the best about it either. About once every five or six months, I'll go through my phone and just start uninstalling apps where I'm like,

I don't remember the last time I've used this. So there are undoubtedly apps that would be helpful in various situations that I get into throughout the day, but I never think about them even though I do have them on my phone. However, a virtual assistant, if implemented well, might potentially make better use of the apps that are on my phone than I do, and then I get to benefit from that. But Apple cut off a lot of that functionality when it bought Siri and limited Series capabilities,

and in a way that's understandable. With Series being an official Apple product, it would be tricky to implement the service with some apps and not others. So for example, if you integrated Siri with one rideshare service but it didn't integrate with another one, would that open up Apple to accusations that it was playing favorites and thus creating an unfair advantage for one company versus another company. It gets tricky. Sirie has also attracted some unwanted attention from

companies that accused Apple of infringing on intellectual property. In ten Apple would settle a lawsuit from rensel Or Polytechnic Institute r p I in New York that claimed that Apple had infringed upon a patent that r p I had licensed to a Dallas company called Dynamic Advances back in two thousand seven, so if you recall that's the same year that SIRIE the company was founded. The settlement

was for about twenty five million dollars. Is The specific allegation had to do with natural language interface, and just this year in twenty Apple was hit with another lawsuit. This one is a true doozy. The lawsuit comes in at a one point four three billion with a B dollars.

The plaintiff in this case is a Chinese AI company called the Shanghai Shijin Intelligent Network Technology or also known as shao I Robot, and the claim is that Siri infringes upon a patented technology that the company filed for way back in two thousand four, and then received a patent for that filing five years later in two thousand nine. So for those keeping track, the project that would ultimately spawn Siri started in two thousand three, but Syria itself

wasn't a thing until two thousand seven. So an Apple spokesperson downplayed this accusation, saying quote, SIRIE does not contain features included in their patent, which relates to games and instant messaging and we are disappointed. Shall I Robot has filed another lawsuit. Independent appraisers certified by the Supreme People's Court have also concluded that Apple does not infringe shall

I Robots technology end quote. It turns out that this same Chinese company sued Apple back in Apple filed a motion to have the company's patent invalidated. I didn't even know that was a thing. The Beijing High Court initially agreed with Apple, but more recently the Supreme People's Court in China has overturned that decision. And so now we're kind of back to where we were when the first lawsuit was filed eight years ago, but now for one

point four billion dollars. Now, that story is still ongoing. I don't have any other updates to give you guys about it, but I will say that natural language processing has been a field that a lot of people have been working on independently over the years. Now, is it possible that the serie team learned of work being done in China and perhaps lifted some of it? Maybe? Is it possible we have two groups that independently arrived at

a similar solution. No, that's also possible, But it's even possible that the lawsuit itself is totally without grounds, as Apple claims it is. I honestly just don't know. What I do know is that voice assistants have in large part failed to be the massive see change that people expected when they first began to emerge around We've seen improvements including the ability to follow a thread of questions or commands about a single topic without having to restate

the topic each time. So, in other words, the assistance now kind of have short term memory, so if you ask a follow up question, they can figure out that it's a follow up question to the thing you just

asked about a moment earlier. And there have been some other controversies to like the fear that these assistants Sirie among them, are listening to way more stuff than what we're aware of, or that by analyzing our behaviors such as when and how we use certain apps, they could be building out enormous dossiers on who we are and what we like, and information that can be really valuable

to third parties out there. I do like the thing that the potential of voice assistance ties in with another concept that I've covered in the past, that of the semantic Web. The idea of the semantic web is that you would have a version of the web, a new version of the web, where you have kind of this personal assistant built into the web itself, and then it learns from your behaviors and can anticipate what you need when you ask questions and get you the most relevant results.

So the more you use it, the more it learns who you are and how you operate, and thus can conform better to your preferences and make it a more seamless experience to use the web. Voice assistants follow a very similar philosophy. Uh, you can't do it without it, also feeling a little creepy, I just don't think it's possible. I also don't think that anyone has made um the killer app version of it yet. Sirie, I think is

still one that has really high name recognition. And I'm curious how many of you out there who have iPhones how often you use it? If ever, my wife rarely uses it. She'll use it if she's driving in the car, for example, so it's hands free, but other than that, I don't think she uses it that often. And to be fair, I have an Android phone. I've got Google Assistant.

I don't use that on my phone either. I will occasionally use the smart speaker we have and use Google Assistant on that, but typically it's just to turn on or off the lights or maybe play some music or something. I don't really use it to its full potential, so I also ask what the weather is going to be. That's the other thing other than that kind of goes

to waste. So this one as an example of technology that has and still to this day, has incredible potential, but I don't think it's living up to it yet, and that is in part the fault of the technology, and in part it's just the fault of our behaviors, people like me who have access to stuff like this and yet wasted by asking if I need to wear a raincoat the next day. But I'm curious to hear what you guys think. You can reach out to me. The best way to do it actually is on Twitter.

The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W. I look forward to hearing from you, and I'll tell to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows