The trustees of Stanford University in the US established Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1946 as a center of innovation.
SRI separated from Stanford University in 1970 and became known as SRI International in 1977.
SRI International leads research projects funded by corporates and government agencies, and then spins out A spin-off or spin-out is created by an organization when it expects that as an independent entity, this sub-part will be worth more.its most promising technologies into standalone startups.
In 2003, the Defense Department gave a project to SRI International to build a virtual assistant, which could help military commanders with both information overload and office chores.
Adam Cheyer, the engineer who was leading the project on this virtual assistant called CALO Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organises. was also – in parallel – working on something similar, Vanguard, for Motorola.
The General Manager at Motorola, Dag Kittlaus, failed to convince Motorola to adopt Vanguard and, therefore, quit the company in 2007 and joined SRI International.
SRI International was in the process of spinning off a new venture (dedicated to this virtual assistant) when Dag Kittlaus joined.
Dag was made the CEO of this new venture, while Adam Cheyer and a few others joined him.
Dag and his wife had always wanted to name their daughter Siri after a former coworker (in Norwegian, Siri means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory”).
They had even registered the domain ‘siri.com‘, but when they had a son, the website was shelved.
When the venture was to become a legal company, Dag chose the name Siri Inc. and everybody agreed as it was easy to type & pronounce, and not a common human name.
The Siri technology was launched as an IOS app available in the Apple Store in early 2010, and soon it was to become available on Blackberry and Android phones as well.
Then, Steve Jobs called Dag for a meeting and bought Siri for $200 million and ended all plans of its availability on Blackberry and Android.
Apple unveiled Siri with the iPhone 4s in October 2011; Jobs was never fond of the name, but Siri stuck because no one could come up with a better name.
Some sources suggest that Siri is now also used as a shorthand for ‘Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface’.
