The President of SRI Ventures on Bringing Siri to Life

The market vision that led to Siri, the virtual personal assistant that’s now an integral part of Apple’s iPhone, can be traced back to 2003, when a mobile phone’s primary applications were still limited to ringtones and messaging. The author and his colleagues at SRI International recognized that the phone’s growing capabilities would eventually put a communicating supercomputer in everyone’s pocket. They believed that their company was well suited to be a leader in the inevitable technology and market revolution—as it had been in every previous computing revolution.

They didn’t originally plan to create a stand-alone venture. They talked to dozens of telecom carriers and handset providers, with the aim of jointly starting a project that would license the technology. But because the few resulting commercial projects implemented only small parts of its original vision, the founding team decided to drop that idea and create and build its own venture. Speech-to-text was the easy part: SRI had launched Nuance, a world leader in speech solutions. The hard part was analyzing words so as to understand the user’s intent and then reason about and answer the request. The runaway success of Siri demonstrates how well the team met that challenge.

HBR Reprint R1509A