Siri virtual personal assistant app

A voice assistant sold as an app

Siri started out as a standalone mobile application rather than a feature built into a phone. The New York Times described it as a mobile application that uses GPS and speech-recognition technology to translate spoken commands, and search algorithms to find answers.^[1] A 2020 retrospective by The Paper places the first Siri virtual personal assistant app in Apple's App Store in February 2010.^[2]

What a spoken request had to become

The newspaper's examples show the sort of thing users were meant to say: find a table for two at 9 tonight, or send a taxi to my house.^[1] Those are tasks rather than search queries. A keyword search can hand back a list of links and leave the rest to the person; a request for a table at nine has to end in an actual booking, and a request for a taxi has to end in a car being dispatched. Getting from one to the other takes a chain of steps: speech recognition turns the sound of a sentence into text, the system has to work out which kind of task is being asked for, a service that can carry out that task has to be chosen, and the result has to come back in a form the user can act on.

Siri did not answer everything itself. The New York Times reports that, for results, it worked with several companies, including Citysearch, OpenTable and Taxi Magic.^[1] The presence of outside partners is the tell: the app's job was to interpret the request and route it, while the listings, the reservations and the cars came from services that already had them. The GPS part matters for the same reason. A request like sending a taxi to my house is only answerable if the app knows where the house is, and location is the piece of context that a typed search query usually leaves out.

Rejection, then a sale

The Paper's retrospective adds a detail about how the company ended up inside Apple: the founding team initially rejected Steve Jobs's acquisition approach, and the company was sold to Apple in April of the same year.^[2] That is a short interval between the app appearing in the store and the team agreeing to sell, and it is the sequence the later accounts of Siri tend to turn on — a product that reached the public first as a third-party download, then as part of Apple.

Norman Winarsky of SRI described the sale, of a product released as a mobile app in February, as "a great event for us in terms of our impact on the world".^[1] The phrasing measures the deal by reach rather than by price: the point being made is that the technology would be used by many people, not that a start-up had found a buyer.

How the purchase was read at the time

Contemporaries looked past the restaurant tables and the taxis. The New York Times quotes Forrester analyst Charles S. Golvin saying Apple may eventually hope to offer an alternative to Google's search service on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.^[1] That framing is what made a small task-completion app look strategically interesting. If a question can be asked out loud and answered by the phone's own software together with a set of chosen partners, then the place where the answer comes from shifts away from the general search engine and towards the device. On that reading, what Apple was buying was not only speech recognition but a route to answers — and the earliest version of that route, in February 2010, was still an app that people had to go and download.