For years, Siri co-founder Norman Winarsky asked his Stanford classes whether he and his colleagues made the right decision selling their voice bot to Apple.
The investor, entrepreneur, and lecturer told me he leaned toward staying independent and IPO. But there was risk operating alone without a deep integration into a mobile operating system like iOS. So after much persistence from Steve Jobs, the deal went through.
Today, fifteen years after Apple bought Siri and one year after the company launched Apple Intelligence, Winarsky’s question is more thought provoking than ever. As Apple gets ready to announce its latest vision for Siri and Apple Intelligence at next week’s WWDC, the company is, in many ways, returning toward the plan that Winarsky and his colleagues laid out in Siri’s early days.
“This personal assistant would be able to take actions for you,” Winarsky told me of the original Siri vision in our latest Big Tech War Stories podcast episode. “How do you find the nearest gas station? Get me a ticket to the local theater? Buy me a hotel room near San Francisco? All these capabilities were things that you wanted it to do rather than just search.”
The full interview — covering Siri’s founding and what’s happened since — is available in full for Big Technology paid subscribers, with preview available for everyone.
As Winarsky tells it, the Siri project began in 2003 with DARPA’s ‘Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes’ project.
