Adam Cheyer, who created Siri and Viv, discusses ideas his team developed but never shipped. Siri was the first mass-market voice assistant, proving that consumer-ready AI could transform niche research into a mainstream platform. At a pitch meeting, Siri's CEO challenged investors to find an app that could answer real questions like "find a highly-rated Indian restaurant within three miles of a hotel." None could.
What, if anything, can be done with this sort of intellectual waste product that you're describing? I mean, essentially, there's probably hundreds of good ideas that have come across your brain. Maybe some of them were great or truly amazing ideas, but there just wasn't the bandwidth, whether they were features inside of Siri or completely different projects that you didn't pursue. What can be done with this sort of intellectual waste product?
It's kind of fun to think about just how much intellectual waste product— that's a very nice way to put it— I've created. Created over the years. Well, so one of the things, you know, one of the reasons I went and talked at this conference was to really remind people not only of my work, but of the work that had been done by the research communities in the past. In many ways, Siri wasn't something new. I'm very proud of it in that it was, I consider it the first broad domain Conversational assistant that has been deployed at mass scale. That's really what Siri was. In research labs, there have been these kinds of systems, sort of in toy versions, for years. But to do it that big, that real, that had never been done before. So, but by coming out with Siri, which was, you know, a relatively, relatively simple version, Compared to the things that had been attempted in research labs before. It now gained customer acceptance, consumer acceptance, and it really kickstarted the industry. I think the voice— when I meet people who are doing speech recognition or these kinds of systems, they say, well, we had been working on that for a long time, and it was like this, and then Siri came out, and all of a sudden the interest went like this. So The idea of going to this conference is, you know, now is the time. There's license to take all of these ideas that this intellectual waste product— I love that term— that have been, you know, laid out and explored. Now there's a vehicle and a consumer interest to bring this to the world. Because do people want a smarter, more capable Siri? I think yes. They're now ready about it. When we started Siri, we're like, I had no idea whether anyone would want a Siri. So I had these questions. We started the company and we said, you know, the iPhone had just come out. They were all nice and shiny. And Google was in a place that consumer perception was people could do anything with Siri— with Google, sorry. And so it's like, who's going to need a different way to access information?
Yeah.
It was a real challenge. I didn't know whether this was the case. So when we went to venture capitalists, we're like, how do we convince them that they need yet another way to access information? And our CEO, Doug Kitlaus, came up with a great way. He would walk into a meeting. He would say, I've got some money here. And he'd pull out a $100 bill. All the venture capitalists would perk up because money's on the table.
Yeah. Right.
And he'd go, hey, do any of you have those newfangled smartphones? And they all pull out their iPhone and BlackBerry and whatever, and they're all proud of it. Do you have apps on those phones? Yep, yep, I've downloaded the latest apps. That's great. Do you have Google on that phone? Yeah, yeah, I've got that too. Great. I've got $100 here if you can answer, if anyone in the room can answer, 3 questions in 5 minutes. And their fingers are poised. They are ready. And then our CEO would say something like, OK, here's the deal. Your customer is coming into town. He's staying at this particular hotel. He loves Indian food. So find a really highly rated Indian food restaurant within 3 miles of the hotel. Go. And they're like, well, I've got Yelp over here, but how do I join the— information from 3 miles— you know, and so he'd give 3 kind of real-world questions, and you realize there was no one app that could do it. That Google could get you to links, and then you're going on this little screen and a typed key. You just can't do it. And then he'd pull out his phone and go, find great, you know, highly rated restaurants within 3 miles of this hotel. Boom, there's the answer. So we had to teach people there was a need for something they didn't know They need it, right? Okay, so now I think everyone says, yeah, yeah, I use Siri somewhat. I have a need. I want it. But I think, does everyone want a better one? I think so. And so all of the ideas are now— you have license. It's really a platform. Or we're now at a place where new innovations or old innovations can be applied, and the world is waiting for it, which didn't exist—
Yeah.
Before we introduced the first version of Siri. Thank you.
