Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech, and today we are
Speaker 1: continuing our exploration of Apple's Virtual Assistant SIRIE, which originally
Speaker 1: debuted as an official Apple feature on October four, two
Speaker 1: th eleven. If you haven't listened to the previous episode,
Speaker 1: I recommend you do that, as I covered a lot
Speaker 1: of the backstory to SIRI, as well as some of
Speaker 1: the technical challenges engineers faced as they built on the
Speaker 1: underlying technologies that you know makes SIRIE a possibility in
Speaker 1: the first place. However, I will do a super quick
Speaker 1: summary of the important points just in case. So SIRIE
Speaker 1: really started off as an offshoot of a Department of
Speaker 1: Defense funded project to create a virtual assistant that military
Speaker 1: commanders would be able to rely upon. S r I International,
Speaker 1: a nonprofit scientific research organization, landed the contract and ultimately
Speaker 1: would spin off a company called SIRI s I r
Speaker 1: I that would explore how to take a subset of
Speaker 1: the technologies that were developed for this Department of Defense
Speaker 1: project and then use it in the consumer market with
Speaker 1: an eye on mobile devices. Now, that was in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, just as consumer smartphones were becoming a thing,
Speaker 1: primarily with of course, the Apple iPhone. By the company
Speaker 1: had a working app that they submitted to the Apple
Speaker 1: App Store, and a few weeks later, Apple CEO Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs called up Dog Kittlause, the head of Sirie, to
Speaker 1: talk about the app and ultimately to make an acquisition offer,
Speaker 1: which the company ultimately accepted. A year later, and one
Speaker 1: day before Steve Jobs's death, Apple would unveil Siri as
Speaker 1: an Apple product, though as we know, the bulk of
Speaker 1: the work on Siri had been done elsewhere. Now that's
Speaker 1: the super fast summary of the actually really interesting backstory
Speaker 1: on Sirie. You can listen to the previous episode to
Speaker 1: get the full thing. But we've got a few other
Speaker 1: things to clear up before we can continue down the
Speaker 1: path of series development. As I mentioned in the previous episode, Sirie,
Speaker 1: the company before Apple's acquisition, had arranged a deal with
Speaker 1: the cell phone carrier company Verizon, and the deal was
Speaker 1: that Siri was going to create an Android app version
Speaker 1: of its service that would be a flagship feature on
Speaker 1: Verizon Android phones. And this is a good time to
Speaker 1: point out one of the major differences between Apple and Android.
Speaker 1: Apple only allows iOS, you know, the operating system of
Speaker 1: the iPhone and the iPad and stuff like that. They
Speaker 1: only allow that to run on Apple products. So if
Speaker 1: you want an iPhone or something running the iPhone operating system,
Speaker 1: you have to go through Apple. I mean, you could
Speaker 1: try to make some other device run iOS on top
Speaker 1: of that device, but my point is that if you
Speaker 1: want the real thing, you have to go to Apple.
Speaker 1: There's nowhere else to go. Google when a totally different route.
Speaker 1: They built out Android, and they made it available for
Speaker 1: installation on all different types of handsets from different companies,
Speaker 1: and so you had a lot of flavors of Android.
Speaker 1: And I'm not just referring to the fact that Google
Speaker 1: uses dessert names for various versions of Android. What I
Speaker 1: actually mean is that you could find one handset manufacturer
Speaker 1: that would preinstall a certain suite of apps on their phones,
Speaker 1: or a cell phone service provider like Verizon might do
Speaker 1: the same thing. So while you could shop around with
Speaker 1: different handsets and providers for an Android phone, the versions
Speaker 1: might look a little different and have different flagship apps
Speaker 1: on the home page. In some cases, you might come
Speaker 1: across a lot of bloatwear. Now those are apps that
Speaker 1: you don't really want or maybe you never even use them,
Speaker 1: but they're pre installed and sometimes they're impossible to remove
Speaker 1: from the phone without going to some pretty big effort. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Verizon wanted Sirie to be an intrinsic app on the
Speaker 1: Android smartphones moving forward, essentially making siri uh an Android
Speaker 1: feature the way it would turn out to be an
Speaker 1: iPhone feature. So Verizon and Sirie began making arrangements in
Speaker 1: the fall of two thousand nine, but Verizon did not
Speaker 1: actually acquire Sirie the company. If it had, our story
Speaker 1: would be very different. Verizon reportedly planned to make Srie
Speaker 1: exclusive to Android, but the companies were doing this through
Speaker 1: a planned partnership, and during the meanwhile, there just was
Speaker 1: no exclusivity in place, so Sirie the company continued to
Speaker 1: develop Sirie the app for the iPhone. The app debut
Speaker 1: a few months after the Verizon deal, and that you
Speaker 1: know was that A couple of weeks later, Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: was calling up kit Loss to talk about bringing SyRI
Speaker 1: on board Apple as an acquisition. And Apple doesn't typically
Speaker 1: acquire that many companies, so this was kind of a
Speaker 1: big deal. That acquisition would take a few months to complete,
Speaker 1: and business journals reported on it around April. The financial
Speaker 1: details of the deal were not made public. Business insider
Speaker 1: analysts estimated that the deal may have fallen somewhere in
Speaker 1: the one hundred to two hundred million dollar range, which
Speaker 1: is a princely sum. Indeed, they based that off the
Speaker 1: fact that Siri had successfully raised twenty four million dollars
Speaker 1: and invest monts up to that point. Now, one of
Speaker 1: the conditions of this acquisition was that Sirie was going
Speaker 1: to be an Apple exclusive feature. It would be baked
Speaker 1: into the basic functionality of iOS moving forward, and a
Speaker 1: consequence of this is that the Verizon deal that Siri
Speaker 1: had made would be null and void and Siri would
Speaker 1: go dark for more than a year as Apple would
Speaker 1: bring the serie team over to Cupertino at Apple HQ
Speaker 1: and then began making some pretty big changes to the
Speaker 1: app in order to integrate it more closely with iOS.
Speaker 1: Not all of those tweaks were additions. For example, the
Speaker 1: original Sirie app, the one that could still make some
Speaker 1: pretty sassy responses to requests, could make restaurant reservations on
Speaker 1: behalf of the user. When Apple would debut Siri as
Speaker 1: an integral iOS feature, it would not have that capability,
Speaker 1: though the service would eventually get the feature back by
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve. My point being that some of the
Speaker 1: changes that Apple was making was to remove functionality from Siri.
Speaker 1: The serie team had worked to secure agreements with various
Speaker 1: other services which allowed Sirie the app to interoperate with
Speaker 1: those services. But those agreements were, you know, with a
Speaker 1: much smaller, nimble and private company, right, Siri was this tiny, entiteam.
Speaker 1: Once Apple entered the picture, all of that changed. Apple
Speaker 1: is Well, let's say that Apple is particular in how
Speaker 1: its technology can interact with stuff that is made by
Speaker 1: other companies. Not all of those earlier relationships that Sirie
Speaker 1: had made when it was an independent company would survive
Speaker 1: the transition over winds SII became part of Apple. On
Speaker 1: top of that, Apple's focus was much more broad than
Speaker 1: series focus had been. I mentioned in the previous episode
Speaker 1: that the discipline of natural language processing, that is, trying
Speaker 1: to make systems that can handle the way we typically
Speaker 1: speak or communicate with one another, as opposed to us
Speaker 1: having to learn how to speak in a way that
Speaker 1: a computer can, you know, follow what we're saying. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: it's particularly tricky because we humans have different ways to
Speaker 1: express things, and none of them tend to be in
Speaker 1: the way that machines process information. And one of the
Speaker 1: big complicating factors that I mentioned in our previous episode
Speaker 1: is that there are thousands of languages and it's hard
Speaker 1: to develop programs that have good natural language processing for
Speaker 1: a single language like English, but it becomes exponentially more
Speaker 1: difficult as you try to support additional languages, each with
Speaker 1: their own peculiarities. Apple, a global company, was selling iPhones
Speaker 1: in more than seventy countries at that point. For Siri
Speaker 1: to be a flagship feature would be across all those phones.
Speaker 1: It would need to be able to respond to a
Speaker 1: lot of different languages. Now, upon its initial release as
Speaker 1: an Apple feature, Siri would just be limited to English, French,
Speaker 1: and German, but it had the goal of expanding those
Speaker 1: capabilities to other languages as well. Building in that capability
Speaker 1: would take a lot of effort and time, and so
Speaker 1: while the serie team might have been able to go
Speaker 1: on deeper dives and you know, give Sirie more incredible abilities,
Speaker 1: a lot of their work had to shift towards localization.
Speaker 1: And this is not meant to be a knock against
Speaker 1: Sirie or Apple. It's just an acknowledgement that the job
Speaker 1: of the designers was really challenging and there were only
Speaker 1: so many hours in a day to make it all work.
Speaker 1: So the acquisition happened. In April twenty ten, the Verizon
Speaker 1: deal died as a result. The serie team moved to Cupertino, California,
Speaker 1: and a lot of work was being done behind in
Speaker 1: the scenes now At the same time, Steve Jobs's health
Speaker 1: was on the decline. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic
Speaker 1: cancer back in two thousand four. In two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: he had temporarily stepped down as CEO to recover from
Speaker 1: what he originally reported as a hormone imbalance, though it
Speaker 1: was later revealed he had undergone a liver transplant. Tim Cook,
Speaker 1: Apple's chief operating officer at the time, would take over
Speaker 1: as sort of an interim CEO, and then Jobs returned
Speaker 1: to work six months later. Jobs was leading the company
Speaker 1: when he made the move to acquire Sirie, but he
Speaker 1: would subsequently suffer more health setbacks. In January eleven, Jobs
Speaker 1: would again take medical leave from Apple, but he would
Speaker 1: continue to Services CEO. During his leave, Cook would take
Speaker 1: over the day to day operations of the company. Jobs
Speaker 1: would then take the stage one final time during the
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven Worldwide Developed First Conference or w w
Speaker 1: d C that took place from June six to June tenth,
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven. He received a standing ovation from the
Speaker 1: crowd before going into the introduction for the week's events,
Speaker 1: and at that event, he talked about the new versions
Speaker 1: of the Apple Mac operating system as well as the
Speaker 1: latest build of iOS, but SIRIE was not quite ready
Speaker 1: to debut, and so there was no mention of the
Speaker 1: innovative service that was going to be reserved for October.
Speaker 1: While the serie team prepared for the official debut of
Speaker 1: SIRIE as an Apple feature, Jobs had to make a
Speaker 1: tough call. On August twenty four, two thousand eleven, Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs resigned as Chief executive Officer of Apple. Tim Cook
Speaker 1: would become the new CEO of the company. Jobs's health
Speaker 1: had declined to a point where he felt he could
Speaker 1: no longer devote energy to running the company that he
Speaker 1: had co founded back in the ninetees seventies, and there
Speaker 1: was a lot of speculation at the time that Apple
Speaker 1: might fall apart without him. After all, when Jobs had
Speaker 1: left Apple in the mid nineteen eighties, the company went
Speaker 1: on to make some pretty awful mistakes that would lead
Speaker 1: it to the brink of bankruptcy. And when Jobs returned
Speaker 1: to Apple in the late nineteen nineties, he would lead
Speaker 1: the company to turn things around and then reach a
Speaker 1: dominant position that no other company had really seen before
Speaker 1: in the consumer marketplace. Steve Jobs seemed integral to the
Speaker 1: corporate identity of Apple, kind of the same way that
Speaker 1: you know, Walt Disney seems inseparable from the Disney Company.
Speaker 1: So people would still say, you know, what would Walt
Speaker 1: do well? A lot of people would say at Apple,
Speaker 1: what would Steve Jobs do well. In October four, two
Speaker 1: thousand and eleven, Apple would hold a press conference to
Speaker 1: launch the iPhone for S. This was technically the fifth iPhone,
Speaker 1: following the original iPhone. Then we had the three G
Speaker 1: so the iPhone two was the three g UM. There's
Speaker 1: reasons for all these numbers and why they are kind
Speaker 1: of confusing, but I won't go into all of them. Anyway.
Speaker 1: After the three G we got the three G S.
Speaker 1: Then we got the iPhone four and that's all because
Speaker 1: numbers are hard. But to be more fair to Apple,
Speaker 1: the iPhone four S would end up bridging a gap
Speaker 1: between the older iPhone four and the future iPhone five.
Speaker 1: The iPhone four S looked a lot like the iPhone four,
Speaker 1: but it did have several hardware improvements, including a faster processor,
Speaker 1: and it also had something that Apple said justified adding
Speaker 1: the letter S to the phone it had, Siri. At
Speaker 1: the October fourth event, which was just called a special event,
Speaker 1: Tim Cook took the stage for the first time as
Speaker 1: CEO to announce a product launch. He handed the presentation
Speaker 1: over to Phil Schiller, who had frequently stood in for
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs at various keynotes during jobs as leaves of absence,
Speaker 1: and Schiller, in turn would bring up Scott Forstall, head
Speaker 1: of iOS. Shortly after announcing Sirie and Forestall would give
Speaker 1: the audience an overview of series capabilities a demo of them,
Speaker 1: as well as well as stress multiple times that Siri
Speaker 1: was in beta mode and just in case you don't
Speaker 1: know what that means, a beta build is a stage
Speaker 1: in development where you're trying to refine a product before
Speaker 1: you get to the point where you you know you
Speaker 1: you release it. And so if you have an alpha build,
Speaker 1: that's really more of a work in progress, and it's
Speaker 1: one that could have potentially enormous changes made to the
Speaker 1: product before it ever goes to production. So really you're
Speaker 1: just trying to make stuff work in alpha. A beta
Speaker 1: build is meant to be one that's fairly close to
Speaker 1: what a company plans to release, but it may still
Speaker 1: need some tweak to make it work just right. So
Speaker 1: you can think of a beta build as being like
Speaker 1: almost ready. And Apple doesn't typically allow people to get
Speaker 1: a look at stuff that's in beta. The company has
Speaker 1: a history of locking things down pretty tightly before showing
Speaker 1: it off. So perhaps the fact that this was an
Speaker 1: exception points at how Series integration into iOS didn't go
Speaker 1: without some setbacks. Now, all that being said, the demo
Speaker 1: at this special event went off without a hitch. Siri
Speaker 1: didn't make any embarrassing mistakes and interpreted Forstall's requests correctly.
Speaker 1: It retrieved relevant information, it didn't have to ask for
Speaker 1: Stall to repeat anything, and it also didn't sass back
Speaker 1: the personal assistant with an attitude had been toned down significantly.
Speaker 1: Siri was ready for its journey with Apple. I've got
Speaker 1: a lot more to say about Sirie, but before I
Speaker 1: get to that, let's take a quick break. At the
Speaker 1: special event, Scott Forstall would walk through some of the
Speaker 1: initial capabilities Siri would have with the launch of the
Speaker 1: new iPhone for s That included looking up information on Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: or providing directions to a landmark, or looking up restaurant
Speaker 1: options that are near you, and that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: including a really neat geo fencing feature. Geo fencing involves
Speaker 1: location data. Essentially, you create an instruction that's dependent upon
Speaker 1: your physical location on the planet. So you might say,
Speaker 1: remind me when I leave the house to swing by
Speaker 1: the post office to your virtual assistant. Now that command
Speaker 1: would then have to be interpreted by the assistants system.
Speaker 1: So if it were Sirie, Siri would monitor your phone's
Speaker 1: location and if your phone indicated that it was leaving
Speaker 1: the area generally known as being home, Siri would then
Speaker 1: send a push notification to the phone to remind you
Speaker 1: that you need to go to the post office. Geo
Speaker 1: fencing is one of those features I think is really neat,
Speaker 1: and yet I don't actually make that much use out
Speaker 1: of it. But maybe I'm the odd one out do
Speaker 1: you guys use a lot of geo fencing features. I
Speaker 1: remember I looked at them as the possibility of setting
Speaker 1: them up so when I was in the office, I
Speaker 1: would get fewer notifications, for example, But I never really
Speaker 1: got to do what I was hoping it would do.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if that was a failure on
Speaker 1: the part of the technology or more likely user failure.
Speaker 1: So if you guys have a lot of, you know,
Speaker 1: experience doing geo fencing type stuff, I'd be curious to
Speaker 1: hear your thoughts. Anyway, the presentation went pretty well. People
Speaker 1: seemed interested in SIRIE. However, I would say this wasn't
Speaker 1: the sort of reaction that really makes it into clip
Speaker 1: montages or anything. You didn't see, you know, people losing
Speaker 1: their minds over the the implications of SIRIE. But it
Speaker 1: was definitely positive. It wasn't like a clunker or anything.
Speaker 1: I'm just not sure how many people grasped how complicated
Speaker 1: the accomplishment actually was. It didn't really get how hard
Speaker 1: these problems were to solve in the back end. Now,
Speaker 1: one other thing they likely did not grasp is that
Speaker 1: Siri didn't actually start out as an Apple product, which
Speaker 1: we know because of the episodes I've just done. But
Speaker 1: during that presentation there really wasn't an indication that it
Speaker 1: was from some other developer. You would walk away thinking
Speaker 1: that Apple developed the whole thing in full at Apple HQ,
Speaker 1: although that wasn't the case now. As I mentioned, this
Speaker 1: event happened on October four, two thousand eleven, and the
Speaker 1: following day, on October five, Steve Jobs passed away. Understandably,
Speaker 1: that piece of news eclipsed all other Apple news that week.
Speaker 1: Heck it it eclipse pretty much all tech news that week.
Speaker 1: Jobs had been a pivotal figure in the world of
Speaker 1: technology in general and Silicon Valley in particular. Under his leadership,
Speaker 1: Apple had gone from teetering on bankruptcy to a company
Speaker 1: that was defining the next generation of hardware with products
Speaker 1: like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. His loss
Speaker 1: was felt around the world, and Sirie perhaps got a
Speaker 1: little less attention as a result. The iPhone Forest would
Speaker 1: go on sale the following week, on October four. Within
Speaker 1: the first weekend of sales, Apple would sell more than
Speaker 1: four million units, which meant that the iPhone Forest broke
Speaker 1: previous records of the fastest selling product ever at that point.
Speaker 1: And about a week after that, Kit Loss Dog kit Loss,
Speaker 1: one of the co founders of Sirie the Company, would
Speaker 1: leave Apple Now. According to reports, the parting was on
Speaker 1: good terms, it was amicable, and it was one that
Speaker 1: Dog had been preparing for over the second half of
Speaker 1: two thousand all eleven. He said he wanted to spend
Speaker 1: more time with his family, and they were living in
Speaker 1: Chicago than For those of you who are not familiar
Speaker 1: with US geography, Chicago, Illinois is about two thousand, one
Speaker 1: fifty miles or three thousand, four hundred sixty kilometers away
Speaker 1: from Cupertino, California. It is not close. He also wanted
Speaker 1: to pursue new entrepreneurial opportunities, so his initial motivation was
Speaker 1: to get Sirie the Company up and running, and that
Speaker 1: had turned out to be a huge success, so he
Speaker 1: was ready to move on to a new challenge. One
Speaker 1: thing I haven't really talked about in these episodes, however,
Speaker 1: is series voice, and I feel like I should at
Speaker 1: least touch on that. So the original voices for Sirie
Speaker 1: came from clips of audio that were recorded by a
Speaker 1: voice actor named Susan Bennett. And when I say original voice,
Speaker 1: I mean the American English voice of Sirie and Bennett
Speaker 1: actually lived in Atlanta at the time. I have no
Speaker 1: idea if she still does. But when she made the
Speaker 1: recordings she did, and here's the kicker, she didn't even
Speaker 1: know she was going to be the voice of Syrie.
Speaker 1: She landed a gig through a voice acting service called
Speaker 1: GM Voices kind of like a talent agency for voice
Speaker 1: over actors, and they specialize in finding voice talent to
Speaker 1: provide audio clips for various automated services. Typically a company
Speaker 1: called scan Soft wanted a voice actor to say a
Speaker 1: ton of phrases, mostly nonsense stuff that made you know,
Speaker 1: no real connective tissue sense or anything. And they wanted
Speaker 1: to make all these different words sounds to build out
Speaker 1: a computerized speech database, essentially to build out the building
Speaker 1: blocks for American English speech, all the little phonemes that
Speaker 1: make up the sounds that then in turn makeup the
Speaker 1: spoken word. Scan Soft took the recorded audio and broke
Speaker 1: it down into those different based phonemes of English, and
Speaker 1: through a process called concatenation, which is simply means that
Speaker 1: that you're stringing together units to make a whole, they
Speaker 1: could construct speech that way, taking all the little basic
Speaker 1: sounds and making up words and sentences that way. During development,
Speaker 1: the serie team turned to a company called Nuance for
Speaker 1: technologies related to voice generation and speech recognition. Nuance had
Speaker 1: merged with scan Soft, and so Bennett's voice, which she
Speaker 1: had recorded way back in two thousand five, was in
Speaker 1: nuances speech database tool set, and someone on the project,
Speaker 1: either at Sirie or at Nuance, chose Bennett's voice for
Speaker 1: the Sirie app and that would make the leap over
Speaker 1: to Apple when Sirie the company was acquired, and so
Speaker 1: in October two thousand eleven, six years after she had
Speaker 1: made the original recordings, she would unknowingly become the voice
Speaker 1: of Sirie. Over in the UK, John Briggs would become
Speaker 1: the first British male voice for Sirie, and down under
Speaker 1: Karen Jacobson would become the Ausee Serie and series voice.
Speaker 1: Or voices I guess I should say would change a
Speaker 1: few times, once in with the introduction of iOS seven,
Speaker 1: and it changed again in twenty nineteen with the introduction
Speaker 1: of iOS thirteen, but in each case the goal was
Speaker 1: to move towards a more natural tone and delivery. As
Speaker 1: the state of the art in voice generation improved and
Speaker 1: became less robotic. If you listen to those early examples
Speaker 1: of Siri, it does get a little robotic in places.
Speaker 1: Back in eleven series, speech was pretty good, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't perfect, and occasionally Siri would mispronounce something as it
Speaker 1: would use one set of phone emes instead of another.
Speaker 1: And it actually makes me think of a joke in
Speaker 1: the show The Play that Goes Wrong Uh, in which
Speaker 1: the characters of the show are putting on a play
Speaker 1: and one of the actors has a tendency to mispronounce words,
Speaker 1: so in one example, he pronounces the word philanthropist as philanthropist,
Speaker 1: And that sort of thing could happen with Syria on
Speaker 1: occasion where there would just be a string of sounds
Speaker 1: to represent a word, but it would be slightly wrong,
Speaker 1: and it would often just be funny. Upon the features
Speaker 1: debut with the iPhone for US, Sirie received some fairly
Speaker 1: positive reviews. Over at Wired, Brian x Chen wrote, quote
Speaker 1: the fifth generation iPhones, superb camera and speedy dual core
Speaker 1: processor are classy additions, but Siri is the reason people
Speaker 1: should buy this phone end quote. Chen praised the apps utility,
Speaker 1: pointing out that it took less time for him to
Speaker 1: do certain tasks using Siri than it would have if
Speaker 1: he had to use his phone and type things in manually.
Speaker 1: He also praised the versatility of the app, including its
Speaker 1: ability to interpret a fairly wide range of commands and
Speaker 1: return with relevant responses, and the positive comments didn't stop there.
Speaker 1: Others praise the app for having what appeared to be
Speaker 1: a wry sense of humor. Hailey Suka Yama. The Washington
Speaker 1: Post actually collected a few examples of people attempting to
Speaker 1: be a little cheeky with Siri and how the assistant
Speaker 1: would often respond in kind, though not with the sort
Speaker 1: of foul language of the original Sirie app from back
Speaker 1: in so For example, when Jason Snell of Macworld asked
Speaker 1: Sirie what was the meaning of life, the universe, and everything,
Speaker 1: Sirie didn't hesitate. Siri responded with forty two, of course,
Speaker 1: which is a reference to the classic sci fi comedy
Speaker 1: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The
Speaker 1: Harvard Business Review proclaimed that Siri quote is as revolutionary
Speaker 1: as the mac end quote, which is a pretty grand statement.
Speaker 1: The journal pointed out that Sirie represented a real step
Speaker 1: forward and creating a natural language interface for computers. For decades,
Speaker 1: computer users had to learn how best to use computers.
Speaker 1: We had to learn how to use a mouse and
Speaker 1: a keyboard. We had to learn how to navigate file
Speaker 1: systems and hunt down programs and type things in in
Speaker 1: a way that a computer could process it. But Siri
Speaker 1: represented a big change in that dynamic. With a system
Speaker 1: like Sirie, you could potentially interact with a computer in
Speaker 1: a much more natural way. The machine would learn how
Speaker 1: to work best with you, not the other way around.
Speaker 1: It would be like the computers in Star Trek the
Speaker 1: next generation. You could speak out what it was you
Speaker 1: wanted to do. The computer would then interpret it and
Speaker 1: do whatever it was you were asking. And this change
Speaker 1: in interfaces could open up a lot of opportunities for
Speaker 1: people who might find it difficult or even impossible to
Speaker 1: interact with computers using the more traditional mouse and keyboard approach,
Speaker 1: or touch screens for that matter. Having something like Siri
Speaker 1: as an alternative to these other interfaces would improve accessibility.
Speaker 1: And that's own that's no small thing. That's not to
Speaker 1: be dismissed. There are millions of people who either cannot
Speaker 1: fully take advantage of technology or they have to go
Speaker 1: to much greater efforts to access it due to challenges
Speaker 1: like vision impairments or mobility issues, and systems like Siri
Speaker 1: could potentially help people gain a higher level of autonomy.
Speaker 1: Of course, with SIRIE, that process was a bit more
Speaker 1: complicated on the back end than you might otherwise imagine.
Speaker 1: The phone wasn't really doing all or even most of
Speaker 1: the work for SIRIE. The voice input was being recorded.
Speaker 1: That audio clip would then be sent to a remote server,
Speaker 1: which would analyze the voice recording, you know, and and
Speaker 1: transcribe it. Other servers would activate to pull relevant information
Speaker 1: from whatever sources were needed, and then that information would
Speaker 1: make its way back to the end users phone and
Speaker 1: series response. So to the user, it seems like the
Speaker 1: phone is doing all the work for you, but in reality,
Speaker 1: the phone is more like a conduit and there's a
Speaker 1: sophisticated network of computers that we're doing the heavy lifting
Speaker 1: in the background. The reason I even mentioned that is
Speaker 1: because it's really good to remember the power that sits
Speaker 1: behind stuff like Siri. It's a pretty big jump to
Speaker 1: go from a relatively thin device that is sending data
Speaker 1: to a large system that's behind the scenes, and then
Speaker 1: make that move to a standalone computer that can interact
Speaker 1: with a person through natural language. The fact that most
Speaker 1: of us aren't interfacing with our electronics through voice might
Speaker 1: be an indicator that this is still a pretty hard
Speaker 1: problem to solve, even when we have a story as
Speaker 1: successful as Siri. Although that success is you know, it's
Speaker 1: not it's not a total success, as we will learn
Speaker 1: as we go on. Uh So, Yeah, the phrase success
Speaker 1: story is a little dangerous to use because it's important
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that not everyone was thrilled with the apps performance.
Speaker 1: In the spring of twelve, a group of Apple customers
Speaker 1: began to file lawsuits against the company. They would have
Speaker 1: ultimately become a class action lawsuit, and the lawsuit alleged
Speaker 1: that the plaintiffs had been falsely advertised to regarding series capabilities.
Speaker 1: Apple had released a bunch of different commercials that were
Speaker 1: showcasing what Siri should be able to do, and these
Speaker 1: people were saying, Sirie doesn't do that, or at least
Speaker 1: it doesn't do it the way you said it does,
Speaker 1: so that became the crux of this lawsuit. They complained
Speaker 1: that reality was falling far short of what had been promised.
Speaker 1: Apple's response to the lawsuits was understandable, but also a
Speaker 1: little bit caddy. Not that I'm judging, but it just
Speaker 1: comes across kind of that way. So here's an excerpt
Speaker 1: from Apple's response to the complaints, as was reported on
Speaker 1: by the Wall Street Journal. Quote they and the thing
Speaker 1: in this case means the plaintiffs offer only general descriptions
Speaker 1: of Apple's advertisements, in complete summaries of Apple's website materials,
Speaker 1: and vague descriptions of their alleged and highly individualized disappointment
Speaker 1: with Sirie Telling Lee. Although plaintiff's claim they became dissatisfied
Speaker 1: with Series performance soon after purchasing their iPhones, they made
Speaker 1: no attempt to avail themselves of Apple's thirty day return
Speaker 1: policy or one year warranty, which remains in effect. Instead,
Speaker 1: they seek to take an alleged personal grievance about the
Speaker 1: purported performance of a popular product and turn it into
Speaker 1: a nationwide class action under California's consumer protection statutes. The
Speaker 1: complaint does not come close to meeting the heavy burden
Speaker 1: necessary to sustain such claims end quote. Now, judges would
Speaker 1: subsequently agree with Apple that the plaintiffs claims really lacked
Speaker 1: specificity and they were just too vague to constitute a
Speaker 1: valid argument. As a result, the class action lawsuit would
Speaker 1: be dismissed in and again in But this would not
Speaker 1: be the only case of legal trouble, and Sirie will
Speaker 1: touch on that again a little bit later. But when
Speaker 1: we come back, we'll talk about when some other members
Speaker 1: of the original serie team took their leave from Apple.
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. By late spring,
Speaker 1: Series Shine was starting to wear off a little bit
Speaker 1: after its debut. The journal nine to five MAC, dedicated
Speaker 1: to All Things Apple, ran a survey that found of
Speaker 1: those who responded said that Sirie needed a bit more
Speaker 1: were but overall was helpful. So they saw the potential,
Speaker 1: but they agreed that it needed a little more time
Speaker 1: in the oven now. To be fair to Apple, for
Speaker 1: Stall had stressed at the October event that Sirie was
Speaker 1: still in beta. He said it a few times, so
Speaker 1: the company was certainly aware that while the tool was
Speaker 1: really interesting and had a lot of potential, it was
Speaker 1: not perfect. Whether consumers were unaware of the caveats that
Speaker 1: Forestall had made, or their expectations were just ultra high
Speaker 1: due to Apple's string of monumental successes. Some folks ended
Speaker 1: up being a little less impressed than others. In September
Speaker 1: twenty twelve, tech journalists reported that Adam Share, another co
Speaker 1: founder of the serie company, had left Apple. Actually he
Speaker 1: had departed Apple in June of but wasn't reported until September.
Speaker 1: He had been serving as an engineer director for iOS.
Speaker 1: He left the company to quote pursue other projects end quote.
Speaker 1: One of those projects was change dot org, the site
Speaker 1: that allows people to create and distribute various petitions. Another
Speaker 1: project was viv Labs, which Samsung would later acquire and
Speaker 1: which also centered around the voice assistant features. And he
Speaker 1: also occasionally performs magic, you know, like in stadium shows
Speaker 1: and for Penn and Teller that's not a joke. He
Speaker 1: is a literal magician. Outside of a relatively small text circle,
Speaker 1: not a lot of folks really knew about him in
Speaker 1: his role of developing Sirie, however, and so I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that many people registered his departure. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: the general public associated Sirie with a specific real life person.
Speaker 1: Another person who did leave Apple around that time, and
Speaker 1: also not this time, not by choice, was Scott Forstall.
Speaker 1: That was the man who had introduced Siri at that
Speaker 1: Apple special event in October two thousand and eleven, he
Speaker 1: had headed up iOS. But a year later in October,
Speaker 1: Apple announced that four Sol would be leaving the company
Speaker 1: by the end of the year. And in this case,
Speaker 1: we kind of know what was going on that led
Speaker 1: to four Stalls departure. So when Syrie debuted, it was
Speaker 1: with the iPhone four S and iOS five. The next
Speaker 1: build of iOS, which thank goodness, was just called iOS six,
Speaker 1: came with a very nasty albatross around its metaphorical neck,
Speaker 1: and that albatross was Apple Maps. Now you may, oh,
Speaker 1: my Drew Gees have forgotten what a mess Apple Maps
Speaker 1: was when it first came out, So let me remind you.
Speaker 1: At the time Apple was cutting ties with Google, the
Speaker 1: Android operating system was beginning to get some real traction,
Speaker 1: and Google's strategy to aim at more moderate markets than
Speaker 1: Apple's prestige products allowed Android to get a big user
Speaker 1: base pretty quickly. One thing Apple did in response was
Speaker 1: to give Google Maps the boot off of iOS. It
Speaker 1: would eventually come back, but Apple famously said, nope, We're
Speaker 1: gonna disable that functionality and replace it with Apple Maps only.
Speaker 1: The trouble was that Apple Maps wasn't as reliable as
Speaker 1: Google Maps, and Google Maps wasn't perfect by any stretch
Speaker 1: of the imagination, but Apple Maps was notably worse. Apple's
Speaker 1: version wasn't as detailed as Google Maps and didn't have
Speaker 1: some of the information that Google included in its applications. So,
Speaker 1: for example, if you were visiting a new city, you
Speaker 1: could use Google Maps to see how to take public
Speaker 1: transit to get around town. Apple Maps did not have
Speaker 1: that functionality when it launched. Worse than that, for some cities,
Speaker 1: particularly cities outside of the United States, major landmarks would
Speaker 1: be mislabeled or would appear in the wrong location on
Speaker 1: a map. It just wasn't good. Apple would ultimately issue
Speaker 1: an apology, which is a huge thing. I mean, Apple
Speaker 1: just doesn't do that typically. I mean it was a
Speaker 1: really rare move for the company to make, but for
Speaker 1: Stall refused to sign the apology. Essentially, he wasn't admitting
Speaker 1: any accountability for the failures of iOS six and Apple
Speaker 1: Maps in particular. Tim Cook would fire Forestall partly because
Speaker 1: of that and for a few other reasons. Tim Cook
Speaker 1: said he wanted a harmonious workplace, which implied that Forstall
Speaker 1: was not the easiest person to work with, and also
Speaker 1: that he wanted a workplace without politics, also implying that
Speaker 1: Forrestall perhaps was playing the little politics in the office
Speaker 1: as well. There were some who argued that Forrestall was
Speaker 1: likely to claim credit where perhaps he wasn't fully justified
Speaker 1: in doing so. I don't know if any of that
Speaker 1: is true, but that's kind of the reporting around it.
Speaker 1: For Stall wasn't one of series founders. He rather was
Speaker 1: sort of the liaison between the serie team and the
Speaker 1: public once Serrie made the move to Apple, because Forestall
Speaker 1: was overseeing iOS in general. Tom Gruber, the third co founder,
Speaker 1: would actually stick with Apple for several more years. He
Speaker 1: was the last one to remain with the company, the
Speaker 1: other two co founders had already left. He would retire
Speaker 1: in ten to pursue his interests, which included ocean conservation
Speaker 1: and photography. But let's get back to twelve. As Apple
Speaker 1: continued to change and adjust to a post Steve Jobs world,
Speaker 1: other companies began to bring products out in an attempt
Speaker 1: to compete with Sirie. Google had its own virtual assistant,
Speaker 1: which sort of grew out of a voice to text
Speaker 1: search feature. It would eventually be known as Google Assistant,
Speaker 1: and Samsung brought out the s Voice Assistant. Amazon would
Speaker 1: introduce Alexa in that's the same year that Microsoft would
Speaker 1: bring its voice assistant Cortana to Windows. Though these days
Speaker 1: I think Alexa, Syrie, and Google Assistant are really the
Speaker 1: three best known virtual assistance. I think Alexa has the
Speaker 1: clear edge on the other two. Cortana has seen a
Speaker 1: lot of quote unquote her functionality reduced since twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: Microsoft is kind of removed a lot of Cortana's features.
Speaker 1: Apparently the deep integration into Windows just didn't work out,
Speaker 1: and that kind of comes back to Apple to One
Speaker 1: of the big criticisms about SIRIE was that once Apple
Speaker 1: brought it on board, once they acquired the company, Apple
Speaker 1: made a lot of decisions that ultimately either reduced series
Speaker 1: functionality or cut it off from growing the way it
Speaker 1: could have otherwise. Before Sirie moved over to Apple, the
Speaker 1: team was hard at work integrating the assistance functionality with
Speaker 1: a whole suite of apps from different developers, and ideally
Speaker 1: you would reach a point where you could just tell
Speaker 1: your device what you wanted and the assistant would work
Speaker 1: out the rest, pulling information or accessing whatever apps are necessary.
Speaker 1: In order to do the thing you wanted it to do.
Speaker 1: In fact, you can imagine an implementation of this in
Speaker 1: which the assistant could even compare different ways to accomplish
Speaker 1: the same task you give it and then go with
Speaker 1: whatever is the best option. So let me give you
Speaker 1: an example. Since the start of the pandemic, I've been
Speaker 1: staying at home, and on occasion I will order food
Speaker 1: from a nearby restaurant for delivery. You'll get a craving
Speaker 1: and I'll say, all right, I want to eat such
Speaker 1: and such, so I'm gonna order from so and so.
Speaker 1: Only not every restaurant works with every delivery service, right,
Speaker 1: So that kind of means that I have to make
Speaker 1: accounts with all these different services like Postmates or door
Speaker 1: Dash or grub Hub, or here in Atlanta we have
Speaker 1: one called zifty. You get the point. And then let's
Speaker 1: say I get a craving for some amazing Thai food
Speaker 1: and I have a specific restaurant I have in mind.
Speaker 1: I have to figure out which of the services works
Speaker 1: with that restaurant, right uh. And if more than one
Speaker 1: of the services works with the restaurant, I might even
Speaker 1: want to compare them to find out who's gonna get
Speaker 1: me the food the quickest, or who's going to do
Speaker 1: it the cheapest, like who's gonna have the lowest service fees.
Speaker 1: So in an ideal implementation of a virtual assistant, the
Speaker 1: assistant would do all of that work for me. It
Speaker 1: would compare the different options, and it might give me
Speaker 1: an informed choice. You know, maybe I just tell the
Speaker 1: assistant that I just want the food and I wanted
Speaker 1: as fast as possible, and that's what matters to me.
Speaker 1: So just find the services going to get it here
Speaker 1: the fastest based on their estimations. Or maybe I might say,
Speaker 1: you know what, money's tight, I want the least expensive
Speaker 1: way to get that order here, and so on. But
Speaker 1: now expand that single use case across us, all apps
Speaker 1: and all potential uses of the assistant, and you see
Speaker 1: where it could really come in handy. Now, I'm not
Speaker 1: the worst when it comes to installing tons of apps
Speaker 1: on my phone and then forgetting about them and never
Speaker 1: using them. But I'm not the best about it either.
Speaker 1: About once every five or six months, I'll go through
Speaker 1: my phone and just start uninstalling apps where I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't remember the last time I've used this. So
Speaker 1: there are undoubtedly apps that would be helpful in various
Speaker 1: situations that I get into throughout the day, but I
Speaker 1: never think about them even though I do have them
Speaker 1: on my phone. However, a virtual assistant, if implemented well,
Speaker 1: might potentially make better use of the apps that are
Speaker 1: on my phone than I do, and then I get
Speaker 1: to benefit from that. But Apple cut off a lot
Speaker 1: of that functionality when it bought Siri and limited Series capabilities,
Speaker 1: and in a way that's understandable. With Series being an
Speaker 1: official Apple product, it would be tricky to implement the
Speaker 1: service with some apps and not others. So for example,
Speaker 1: if you integrated Siri with one rideshare service but it
Speaker 1: didn't integrate with another one, would that open up Apple
Speaker 1: to accusations that it was playing favorites and thus creating
Speaker 1: an unfair advantage for one company versus another company. It
Speaker 1: gets tricky. Sirie has also attracted some unwanted attention from
Speaker 1: companies that accused Apple of infringing on intellectual property. In
Speaker 1: ten Apple would settle a lawsuit from rensel Or Polytechnic
Speaker 1: Institute r p I in New York that claimed that
Speaker 1: Apple had infringed upon a patent that r p I
Speaker 1: had licensed to a Dallas company called Dynamic Advances back
Speaker 1: in two thousand seven, so if you recall that's the
Speaker 1: same year that SIRIE the company was founded. The settlement
Speaker 1: was for about twenty five million dollars. Is The specific
Speaker 1: allegation had to do with natural language interface, and just
Speaker 1: this year in twenty Apple was hit with another lawsuit.
Speaker 1: This one is a true doozy. The lawsuit comes in
Speaker 1: at a one point four three billion with a B dollars.
Speaker 1: The plaintiff in this case is a Chinese AI company
Speaker 1: called the Shanghai Shijin Intelligent Network Technology or also known
Speaker 1: as shao I Robot, and the claim is that Siri
Speaker 1: infringes upon a patented technology that the company filed for
Speaker 1: way back in two thousand four, and then received a
Speaker 1: patent for that filing five years later in two thousand nine.
Speaker 1: So for those keeping track, the project that would ultimately
Speaker 1: spawn Siri started in two thousand three, but Syria itself
Speaker 1: wasn't a thing until two thousand seven. So an Apple
Speaker 1: spokesperson downplayed this accusation, saying quote, SIRIE does not contain
Speaker 1: features included in their patent, which relates to games and
Speaker 1: instant messaging and we are disappointed. Shall I Robot has
Speaker 1: filed another lawsuit. Independent appraisers certified by the Supreme People's
Speaker 1: Court have also concluded that Apple does not infringe shall
Speaker 1: I Robots technology end quote. It turns out that this
Speaker 1: same Chinese company sued Apple back in Apple filed a
Speaker 1: motion to have the company's patent invalidated. I didn't even
Speaker 1: know that was a thing. The Beijing High Court initially
Speaker 1: agreed with Apple, but more recently the Supreme People's Court
Speaker 1: in China has overturned that decision. And so now we're
Speaker 1: kind of back to where we were when the first
Speaker 1: lawsuit was filed eight years ago, but now for one
Speaker 1: point four billion dollars. Now, that story is still ongoing.
Speaker 1: I don't have any other updates to give you guys
Speaker 1: about it, but I will say that natural language processing
Speaker 1: has been a field that a lot of people have
Speaker 1: been working on independently over the years. Now, is it
Speaker 1: possible that the serie team learned of work being done
Speaker 1: in China and perhaps lifted some of it? Maybe? Is
Speaker 1: it possible we have two groups that independently arrived at
Speaker 1: a similar solution. No, that's also possible, But it's even
Speaker 1: possible that the lawsuit itself is totally without grounds, as
Speaker 1: Apple claims it is. I honestly just don't know. What
Speaker 1: I do know is that voice assistants have in large
Speaker 1: part failed to be the massive see change that people
Speaker 1: expected when they first began to emerge around We've seen
Speaker 1: improvements including the ability to follow a thread of questions
Speaker 1: or commands about a single topic without having to restate
Speaker 1: the topic each time. So, in other words, the assistance
Speaker 1: now kind of have short term memory, so if you
Speaker 1: ask a follow up question, they can figure out that
Speaker 1: it's a follow up question to the thing you just
Speaker 1: asked about a moment earlier. And there have been some
Speaker 1: other controversies to like the fear that these assistants Sirie
Speaker 1: among them, are listening to way more stuff than what
Speaker 1: we're aware of, or that by analyzing our behaviors such
Speaker 1: as when and how we use certain apps, they could
Speaker 1: be building out enormous dossiers on who we are and
Speaker 1: what we like, and information that can be really valuable
Speaker 1: to third parties out there. I do like the thing
Speaker 1: that the potential of voice assistance ties in with another
Speaker 1: concept that I've covered in the past, that of the
Speaker 1: semantic Web. The idea of the semantic web is that
Speaker 1: you would have a version of the web, a new
Speaker 1: version of the web, where you have kind of this
Speaker 1: personal assistant built into the web itself, and then it
Speaker 1: learns from your behaviors and can anticipate what you need
Speaker 1: when you ask questions and get you the most relevant results.
Speaker 1: So the more you use it, the more it learns
Speaker 1: who you are and how you operate, and thus can
Speaker 1: conform better to your preferences and make it a more
Speaker 1: seamless experience to use the web. Voice assistants follow a
Speaker 1: very similar philosophy. Uh, you can't do it without it,
Speaker 1: also feeling a little creepy, I just don't think it's possible.
Speaker 1: I also don't think that anyone has made um the
Speaker 1: killer app version of it yet. Sirie, I think is
Speaker 1: still one that has really high name recognition. And I'm
Speaker 1: curious how many of you out there who have iPhones
Speaker 1: how often you use it? If ever, my wife rarely
Speaker 1: uses it. She'll use it if she's driving in the car,
Speaker 1: for example, so it's hands free, but other than that,
Speaker 1: I don't think she uses it that often. And to
Speaker 1: be fair, I have an Android phone. I've got Google Assistant.
Speaker 1: I don't use that on my phone either. I will
Speaker 1: occasionally use the smart speaker we have and use Google
Speaker 1: Assistant on that, but typically it's just to turn on
Speaker 1: or off the lights or maybe play some music or something.
Speaker 1: I don't really use it to its full potential, so
Speaker 1: I also ask what the weather is going to be.
Speaker 1: That's the other thing other than that kind of goes
Speaker 1: to waste. So this one as an example of technology
Speaker 1: that has and still to this day, has incredible potential,
Speaker 1: but I don't think it's living up to it yet,
Speaker 1: and that is in part the fault of the technology,
Speaker 1: and in part it's just the fault of our behaviors,
Speaker 1: people like me who have access to stuff like this
Speaker 1: and yet wasted by asking if I need to wear
Speaker 1: a raincoat the next day. But I'm curious to hear
Speaker 1: what you guys think. You can reach out to me.
Speaker 1: The best way to do it actually is on Twitter.
Speaker 1: The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W.
Speaker 1: I look forward to hearing from you, and I'll tell
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows