History would have been written much differently if Verizon had its druthers a few years ago.
This week, the Huffington Post is taking a look back at the origins and launch of Siri, Apple's popular speech-powered virtual assistant. According to new information coming to light about the birth of Siri, this feature almost didn't happen for iOS. In fact, it was almost an Android asset.
In late 2009, well before Apple approached Siri, Verizon made a move to sign a deal with the startup in hopes of making Siri a default app on all Android phones to launch in 2010 and beyond. But then came Apple. The next year, Apple bought Siri under the terms of the virtual assistant remaining exclusive to Apple devices. As a result, the proposed Verizon deal was dead in the water.
“The way that Steve described it, speech recognition -- and how to use it to create a speech interface for something like the iPhone -- was an area of interest to him and Scott Forstall [then head of Apple's mobile software] for some time,” remembers Dag Kittlaus, Siri's co-founder and chief executive. “The story that I’m told is that he thought we’d cracked that paradigm with our simple, conversational interface.”
Speech recognition was apparently so important to Steve Jobs that Apple was more than willing to cough up somewhere between $150 to $250 million for the technology, which arrived on iOS in October 2011.
To read more about the history of Siri from the HP report, click here.
Source: Huffington Post
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