Machines of Loving Grace (45 page)

Despite having his project sold to Tymnet in the early 1970s, Doug Engelbart had been brought back into the fold at SRI when Cheyer had arrived, and Cheyer had come to know the aging computer scientist as a father figure and a guiding light.
Working on projects that were inspired by Engelbart’s augmentation ideas, he had tried to persuade Engelbart that he was working in his tradition.
It had been challenging.
By the 1990s, Engelbart, who had mapped it all out beginning in
the 1960s, was a forlorn figure who felt the world had ignored him.
It didn’t matter to Cheyer.
He saw the power of Engelbart’s original vision clearly and he took it with him when he left SRI to build Siri.

In college, Cheyer had begun visualizing goals clearly and then systematically working to achieve them.
One day just as they were getting started he wandered into an Apple Store and saw posters with an array of colorfully crafted icons representing the most popular iPhone applications.
All of the powerful software companies were there: Google, Pandora, Skype.
He focused on the advertising display and said to himself: “Someday Siri is going to have its icon right here on the wall of an Apple Store!
I can picture it and I’m going to make this happen.”

They went to work.
In Gruber’s view, the team was a perfect mix.
Cheyer was a world-class engineer, Kittlaus was a great showman, and Gruber was someone who could build high-technology demos that wowed audiences.
They knew how to position their project for investors and consumers alike.
They not only anticipated the kinds of questions people would ask during a demo; they also researched ideas and technology that would have the most crowd appeal.
Convincing the observer that the future was just around the corner became an art form unique to Silicon Valley.
The danger, of course, was being too convincing.
Promising too much was a clear recipe for disaster.
Other personal assistants projects had failed, and John Sculley had publicized a grand vision for Knowledge Navigator, which he never delivered.
As Siri’s developers kicked the project into high gear, Gruber dug out a copy of the Knowledge Navigator video.
When Apple had shown it years earlier, it had instigated a heated debate within the user interface design community.
Some would argue—and still argue—against the idea of personifying virtual assistants.
Critics, such as Ben Shneiderman, insisted that software assistants were both technically and ethically flawed.
They argued for
keeping human users in direct control rather than handing off decisions to a software valet.

The Siri team did not shy away from the controversy, and it wasn’t long before they pulled back the curtain on their project, just a bit.
By late spring 2009, Gruber was speaking obliquely about the new technology.
During the summer of that year he appeared at a Semantic Web conference and described, point by point, how the futuristic technologies in the Knowledge Navigator were becoming a reality: there were now touch screens that enabled so-called gestural interfaces, there was a global network for information sharing and collaboration, developers were coding programs that interacted with humans, and engineers had started to finesse natural and continuous speech recognition.
“This is a big problem that has been worked on for a long time, and we’re beginning to see some progress,” he told the audience.
Gruber also pointed to developments that were on the horizon, like conversational speech between a computer agent and a human and the delegation of tasks to computers—like telling a computer: “Go ahead, make that appointment.”
Finally, he noted, there was the issue of trust.
In the Knowledge Navigator video, the professor had let the computer agent handle calls from his mother.
If that wasn’t a sign of trust, what was?
Gruber hoped his technology would inspire that same level of commitment.

After discussing the technologies forecasted in the Knowledge Navigator video, Gruber teased the audience.
“Do we think that this Knowledge Navigator vision is possible today?”
he asked.
“I’m here to announce”—he paused slightly for effect—“that the answer is still no.”
The audience howled with laughter and broke into applause.
He added, “But we’re getting there.”

T
he Siri designers discovered early on that they could quickly improve cloud-based speech recognition.
At that
point, they weren’t using the SRI-inspired Nuance technology, but instead a rival system called Vlingo.
Cheyer noticed that when speech recognition systems were placed on the Web, they were exposed to a torrent of data in the form of millions of user queries and corrections.
This data set up a powerful feedback loop to train and improve Siri.

The developers continued to believe that their competitive advantage would be that the Siri service represented a fundamental break with the dominant paradigm for finding information on the Web—the information search—exemplified by Google’s dramatically successful search engine.
Siri was
not
a search engine.
It was an intelligent agent in the form of a virtual assistant that was capable of social interaction with humans.
Gruber, who was also chief technology officer at Siri, laid out the concepts underlying the service in a series of white papers in the form of technical presentations.
Finding information should be a conversation, not a search, he argued.
The program should be capable of disambiguating questions to refine the answers to human questions.
Siri would provide services—like finding movies and restaurants—not content.
It would act as a highly personalized broker for the human user.
In early 2010 the Siri team put together an iPhone demonstration for their board of directors.
Siri couldn’t speak yet, but the program could interpret spoken queries and converse by responding to human queries in natural language sentences that were displayed in cartoonlike bubbles on screen.
The board was enthusiastic and gave the developers more time to tune and polish the program.

In February of 2010, the tiny start-up released the program on the iPhone App Store.
They received early positive reviews from the Silicon Valley digerati.
Robert Scoble, one of the Valley’s high-profile technology bloggers, referred to it as “the most useful thing that I’ve seen so far this year.”
Faint praise perhaps—it was still very early in the year.

Gruber was away at a technology retreat during the release
and had almost no access to the Web when the product was first available.
He had to rely on secondhand reports—“Dude, have you seen what’s happening to your app?!”—to keep up.

It got better.
Thanks to a clever decision to place the application in a less obvious category on the App Store—Lifestyle—the Siri Assistant immediately shot right to the top of the category.
It was one of the tricks Gruber had learned during his time at Real Travel—the art of search engine optimization.
Although they had introduced Siri on the iPhone, Kittlaus had negotiated a spectacular agreement with Verizon, which did not yet carry the iPhone.
He described it as “the greatest mobile deal in history.”
The deal guaranteed that Siri would be on every new Verizon phone, which meant that the software would become the poster child for the Android smartphone.
The deal was almost set in stone when Kittlaus received a call on his cell phone.

“Hi, Dag,” the caller said.
“This is Steve Jobs.”

Kittlaus was momentarily stunned.
“How did you get this phone number?”
he asked.

“It’s a funny story,” Jobs replied.
He hadn’t had any idea how to find the small development team, but he had hunted around.
Because every iPhone developer had to supply a phone number to the App Store, Apple’s CEO found Kittlaus’s number in his developer database.

The team’s first foray into the legendary “reality distortion field”—Jobs’s personal brand of hypnotic charisma—wasn’t promising.
Jobs invited the trio of Siri developers to his house in the heart of old Palo Alto.
Jobs’s home was a relatively low-key 1930s Tudor-style set next to an empty lot that he had converted into a small grove of fruit trees and a garden.
They met in the living room, which was sparsely furnished, like much of Jobs’s home, and featured an imposing Ansel Adams original.

Jobs presented the trio with a dilemma.
They had all been successful in Silicon Valley, but none of them had yet achieved
the career-defining IPO.
The Siri team—and certainly their board members—thought it was very possible that they would receive a huge public stock offering for Siri.
Jobs made it clear that he wanted to acquire Siri, but at that juncture the team wasn’t planning to sell.
“Thank you very much,” they told him, and then left.

Several weeks later Apple was back.
They were once again invited to Jobs’s home, where Jobs, then clearly sick despite continuing to publicly deny it, turned on the charm.
He promised them an overnight market of one hundred million users—with no marketing and no business model.
Or, Jobs said, they could roll the dice, try to be the next Google, and slog it out.
The Siri team also understood that if they went with Verizon, they would run the risk of being shut out of the iTunes Store.
Steve didn’t have to say it, but it was clear that they had to choose which half of the market they wanted.

Jobs’s offer sold them, but it didn’t immediately sell the board, which was by now eager for an IPO exit.
The three founders had to reverse ground and persuade their board members.
Ultimately the investors were convinced; Jobs’s offer was lucrative enough and offered much lower risk.

Soon after Apple acquired Siri in April of 2010, the Siri team moved into the very heart of the office space for Apple’s design group, on half of the top floor of Infinite Loop 2.
Although Apple could have licensed Nuance to convert speech directly to text—which Google later did—Jobs decided that Apple would undertake the more ambitious task of placing an intelligent assistant software avatar on the iPhone.
Siri helped solve another major problem that Apple had with its new iPhone and iPad.
Glass screens and multitouch control could replace a keyboard and mouse for navigation through screens, but they did not work well for data entry.
This was a weak point, despite Jobs’s magnificent demonstration of text entry and auto-correction during the first product introduction.
Speech entry of single words or entire sentences is many times
more rapid than painstakingly entering individual words by poking at the screen with a finger.

In the beginning, however, the project was met with resistance within the company.
Apple employees would refer to the technology as “voice control,” and the Siri team had to patiently explain that their project had a different focus.
The Siri project didn’t feed into the “eye candy” focus at Apple—the detailed attention of software and hardware design that literally defined Apple as a company—but was instead about providing customers with reliable and invisible software that worked well.
But many engineers in the software development organization at Apple thought that if Steve—and later on one of his top lieutenants, Scott Forstall—didn’t say “make it happen,” they didn’t need to work on that project.
After all, Apple was not recognized as a company that developed cloud-computing services.
Why reinvent the wheel?
An assistant or simply voice control?
After all, how much difference would it really make?
In fact, people were dying while reading email and “driving while intexticated,” so presenting drivers with the ability to use their phones safely while driving made a tremendous difference.

When Apple’s project management bureaucracy balked at the idea of including the ability to send a hands-free text message in the first version of the software, Gruber, who had taken the role of a free-floating technical contributor after the acquisition, said he would take personal responsibility for completing the project in time for the initial Apple Siri launch.
He decided it was a “put your badge on the table” issue.
With just a summer intern in tow, he worked on all of the design and prototyping for the text messaging feature.
He begged and borrowed software engineers’ time to help build the system.
In the end, it was accepted.
At the time of Siri’s launch, it was possible to send and receive texts without touching the iPhone screen.

Not everything went as smoothly, however.
The Siri team also wanted to focus on what he called “attention management.”
The virtual personal assistant should also help people remember their “to-do list” in an “external memory” so they wouldn’t have to.
The original Siri application had an elaborate design for what the team described as “personal memory”: it wove an entire set of tasks together in the right order, prodding the user at each step like a good secretary.
In the race to bring Siri to the iPhone, however, much of the deeper power of the service was shelved, at least temporarily.
The first iteration of Siri only included a small subset of what the team had originally created.