Siri

Episode 5 covers Apple's acquisition of Siri. The history starts with SRI International — itself a fascinating organization, founded in 1946 by Stanford's trustees as the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, funded by the government, Stanford, and others, with a mission to research basic technology and spin it out for commercialization. In the mid-2000s SRI worked on CALO, a DARPA-funded project to build an AI-based personal assistant for the government and military. SRI saw the potential to spin it out, commercialize it, and put it on smartphones; the company that became Siri spun out in 2008.

The naming story (told by co-founder and VP of engineering Adam Cheyer on Quora): Siri echoes SRI; CEO Dag Kittlaus had once considered it for his daughter's name; in Norse it means "a beautiful woman who leads you to victory"; and in Swahili, "secret" — a nod to the project's stealth days at stealth-company.com, whose wonderfully old-school site announced "Silicon Valley's next great company... we aim to fundamentally redesign the face of consumer internet," with news items like "office location finalized on February 1st" and "money raised from top VCs (lots)."

As a consumer app — iOS only, in the iPhone 3G/3GS era — Siri's UI was, by today's recollection, terrible; whether that was table stakes or function-before-form is hard to judge now. One host's favorite feature was typing instead of speaking, which Apple later ditched. Under the hood: a massive license with Nuance for all speech recognition (Nuance itself a former SRI spin-out, still independent and licensing to every major player), combined with integrations for the functions Siri served — OpenTable for restaurants and reservations, weather, the usual APIs. Behind the scenes it was, the hosts guess, "bailing wire and duct tape": if-then statements and regular expressions parsing whatever you said. In practice, doing anything through Siri was harder than just opening the OpenTable app yourself.

Context: this was before proper dictation on the iPhone — one host recalls opening Nuance's Dragon Dictation app to talk and copy-pasting the text elsewhere. Today he uses dictation far more than Siri; Apple eventually bundled all of it into one thing.