Mike Yallits' Blog: Siri’s Got An Attitude, Here’s How Apple Developed It

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Siri’s Got An Attitude, Here’s How Apple Developed It

Those who have been lucky enough to get their hands on and play with Siri's intelligent responses in the last couple of days, must have noted that Apple's intelligent voice assistant built into the iPhone 4S has a bit of an attitude. Trying to find out how Apple built Siri's quirky personality, the Wall Street Journal spoke with one of the co-founders of the original Siri on how Apple approached them on developing it.

As written by MacRumors:

"There were many conversations within the team about whether it should be gender neutral" or "should have an 'attitude,' " said Mr. Winarsky, who didn't go to Apple, and still works at SRI. The result, before the software was bought by Apple, was "occasionally a light attitude," he said.
According to a different person who actually worked at Apple on the Siri project, Apple focused on keeping Siri's personality "friendly and humble — but also with an edge". According to their source, they were thinking "How would we want a person to respond?" while developing the software.

It is said the Siri group is one of the biggest software teams working at Apple who deliberately crafted Siri's responses to develop an emotional connection with the customers.

Siri's Got An Attitude, Here's How Apple Developed It is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog - Canada's #1 iPhone Resource