Siri

Heading to South by Southwest

2010-03-13T00:08:26+00:00

We’re excited to head to SXSW this weekend. After a whirlwind launch several weeks ago, we’re honored to have been chosen as a finalist in the BizSpark Accelerator competition. There were over 200 companies vying for a seat at the table; it’ll be great to hear what the judges think and to see the other interesting technologies presenting. The event will take place at 10:30 AM on Monday.

In addition, Dag, our CEO, will speak on a panel that discusses new search technologies that take advantage of the Semantic Web to deliver more personalized results. The panel is entitled, “Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web” and will take place on Sunday at 3:30 PM.

If you're going to the conference, we hope to see you there. Otherwise, you can follow us @Siri on Twitter. We'll be tweeting throughout the conference about the fun things that we see.

Our Most Excellent Collaborators

2010-02-19T22:02:13+00:00

Now that we have officially launched Siri, we want to take a moment to formally thank the web services companies who have been important contributors to our overall development.

Delegated Computing and the Future of the Web

2010-02-08T19:34:55+00:00

Robert Scoble has written an insightful new post called Why if you miss Siri you’ll miss the future of the Web. I'm biased, of course, but I find the topic important, and I am enjoying the ensuing discussion in the comments enough to respond in this blog entry.

The Birth of the Virtual Assistant

2010-01-30T00:08:24+00:00

In the near future, anyone who lives a connected lifestyle will be able to delegate their everyday tasks to intelligent virtual assistants that will coordinate, execute and simplify users’ lives. We will look back on these days and ask ourselves how we ever got by without our trusted assistants, the same way my kids ask in amazement about how we ever got things done before laptops and the Internet.

For a long time, Hollywood has been portraying machines that humans can converse with, delegate tasks to, and command. Remember the HAL 9000, KITT the car, COMPUTER from Star Trek, or even the brilliantly conceived and visualized Apple "Knowledge Navigator" from over 20 years ago?

They have symbolized our desire for trusted machine assistants that can help make our lives easier. They have persisted in the creative works of science fiction writers for decades. But have you ever asked yourself why that is? Looking beyond the theatrical and dramatic value of these ideas, the reality is simple — we have always desired more help, less hassle, and higher productivity in our lives.

Tom to give keynote at Web 3.0 next week

2010-01-22T05:43:51+00:00

It’s been a while since our last post on this blog – we’ve been heads-down working hard for the past few months. We look forward to sharing what we’ve been working on; 2010 should be very exciting! We also wanted to let you know about Tom’s upcoming keynote at the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara next week. It is titled “Big Think, Small Screen: How semantic computing in the cloud will revolutionize the consumer experience on the phone” and it will be a moderated Q&A. You can find the program and session details here.

2010 South by Southwest PanelPicker goes live

2009-08-20T06:00:34+00:00

South By Southwest today launched the 2010 Interactive PanelPicker. Users get a 30% say in what panels will be selected (there’s over 2K+ proposed topics this year). We submitted two panels. If you like our proposed topics, we’d appreciate if you’d vote for our panels so they will become part of SWSXi this year.

Partnering with True Knowledge

2009-08-12T06:03:04+00:00

We are excited to announce that we are partnering with True Knowledge, an answer engine which uses natural language to understand and answer questions. This is the first of many partnerships that we’ll announce over the coming weeks and months. The collaboration is a great fit for both of us. True Knowledge offers the leading semantic answer engine, and as a result, Siri gets a lot smarter. In return, True Knowledge will be a big part of our rollout this year, and we’ll be introducing their service to millions of new users.

Joining the Verizon Developer Advisory Board

2009-07-29T06:05:00+00:00

I’m proud to announce that today, we are joining the inaugural Verizon Developer Advisory Board, alongside a host of established mobile innovators. The Advisory Board is itself a forum designed to provide feedback about how the Verizon developer community and Verizon applications store will grow and evolve, as well as to “foster a productive and innovative developer ecosystem.” Details of the announcement can be found here.

Siri Keynote at the Semantic Technologies Conference: Slides and Video

2009-07-03T06:07:40+00:00

I enjoyed the opportunity to speak at the Semantic Technologies conference about virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and where the space is headed. Thank you for the thoughtful questions and great feedback. It was fun speaking at SemTech again, and to see the innovations that have been made in the past year. In addition to the fascinating conversations in the halls, I really enjoyed the panel on semantic search. Seems like semantics is going mainstream.

See the second public demo of Siri at the Semantic Technology Conference next week

2009-06-11T06:09:27+00:00

On the heels of last month’s D conference unveiling, our CTO Tom Gruber will be giving a keynote talk at the Semantic Technology Conference on Tuesday morning, June 16th, titled: “The Siri Virtual Assistant: Bringing Intelligence to the Interface”. The keynote is also a follow-up to the talk Tom gave at last year’s gathering, as Siri first started to come out of hiding and describe the many opportunities inherent in assistant-ness. The slides from last May are available here for download, and CNET’s Dan Farber also did an elegant write-up of the concepts outlined therein.