Machines of Loving Grace (44 page)

Computing had become a prosthesis, not in a bad sense, but rather as a way to augment human capabilities as first foreseen by Vannevar Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart.
Intraspect and Hypermail had been efforts to build a cognitive prosthesis for work that needed to go beyond the size of a small tribe.
The nature of collaboration was changing overnight.
People could have conversations when they weren’t in the same room, or even in the same time zone.
Simple online email lists like www-talk were being used to develop new Web standards.
A permanent archive made it possible for new participants to quickly get up to speed on various issues by reading a record of past conversation.

The idea of the archive would become the guiding principle in the development of Siri.
The SRI engineers developed an external memory that provided notes, reminders, schedules, and information, all in the form of a human conversation.
The Siri designers adapted the work done on CALO and polished it.
They wanted a computer that would take over the task of secretary.
They wanted it to be possible to say, “Remind me to call Alan at three thirty or on my drive home.”

Just before Cheyer’s project was renamed Siri, Gruber would arrive to work with the tiny team at SRI that included Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus.
Kittlaus had been managing mobile
communications projects at Motorola before coming to SRI.
They code named the project HAL, with only a hint of irony.

Cheyer was charming, but he was also fundamentally a highly technical engineer, and for that reason could never be the head of a company.
Kittlaus was the opposite.
A good-looking, tanned Norwegian executive who straddled the line between technology development and business, he was a quintessentially polished business development operator.
He had done early work on the mobile Internet in Europe.
Kittlaus arrived with a broad charter, having been asked by the lab’s managers to come in as an “entrepreneur-in-residence.”
There wasn’t any particular assignment; he was just supposed to look around and find something promising.
It was Kittlaus who found Cheyer.
He immediately realized that Cheyer was a hidden gem.

They had first met briefly when Cheyer had been demonstrating prototypes for the wireless industry based on his OAA work in the 1990s.
There had been some interest from the telecommunication industry, but Cheyer had realized that there was no way that his toy demos, written in the Prolog artificial intelligence language, would be something that could be used by millions of mobile phone users.

Although SRI later took pains to draw the links between CALO and Siri in order to garner a share of the credit, it was Cheyer who had dedicated his entire career to pursuing the development of a virtual assistant and natural language understanding.
When Kittlaus first saw Cheyer’s work on Siri in 2007, he told him, “I can make a company out of this!”
Cheyer, however, wasn’t immediately convinced.
He didn’t see how Kittlaus could commercialize Siri, but he agreed to help him with the demos.
Kittlaus won him over after buying him an iPhone, which had just been released.
Cheyer had a very old Nokia and no interest in the new smartphone gadgets.
“Play with this!”
Kittlaus told him.
“This thing is a game changer.
Two years from now there will be a competitive response and every handset manufacturer and telco will be desperate to compete with Apple.”
Since bandwidth
would still be slow and screens would still be small, the companies that tried to compete with Apple would have to look for any competitive advantage they could find.

They were planning a start-up and so they began looking for a technical cofounder, but they also needed an outsider to assess the technology.
That search led them to Tom Gruber.
Cheyer and Kittlaus prepared a simple demo that appeared in Mosaic, the first Web browser, for Gruber.
Users could type a question into a search box and it would respond.
At the outset he was skeptical.

“I’ve seen this before, you guys are trying to boil the ocean,” he told Cheyer.

The program seemed like a search engine, but then Cheyer began to reveal all the AI components they had integrated into the machine.

Gruber paused.
“Wait a moment,” he said.
“This isn’t going to be just a search engine, is it?”

“Oh no,” Cheyer responded.
“It’s an assistant.”

“But all you’re showing me is a search engine.
I haven’t seen anything about an assistant,” Gruber replied.
“Just because it talks to me doesn’t mean anything.”

He kept asking questions and Cheyer kept showing him hidden features in the system.
As he continued the demonstration, Gruber started to run out of steam and fell silent.
Kittlaus chimed in: “We’re going to put it on phones.”

That took Gruber by surprise.
At that point, the iPhone had not yet become a huge commercial success.

“This phone is going to be everywhere,” Kittlaus said.
“This is going to completely change the world.
They are going to leave the BlackBerry behind and we want to be on this phone.”
Gruber had spent his time designing for personal computers and the World Wide Web, not mobile phones, so hearing Kittlaus describe the future of computing was a revelation.

In the mid-2000s, keyboards on mobile phones were a limiting factor and so it made more sense to include speech recognition.
SRI had been at the forefront of speech recognition research for decades.
Nuance, the largest independent speech recognition firm, got its start as an SRI spin-off, so Cheyer understood the capabilities of speech recognition well.

“It’s not quite ready yet,” he said.
“But it will be.”

Gruber was thrilled.
Cheyer had been the chief architect of the CALO project at SRI, and Kittlaus had deep knowledge of the mobile phone industry.
Moreover, Cheyer had access to a team of great programmers who were equipped with the necessary skills to build an assistant.
Gruber realized immediately that this project would reach an audience far larger than anything he had worked on before.
In order to succeed, though, the team needed to figure out how to design the service to interact well with humans.
From his time at Intraspect and Real Travel, Gruber understood how to build computing systems for use by nontechnical consumers.
“You need a VP of design,” he told them.
It was clear to Gruber that he had the opportunity to work with two of the world’s leading experts in their fields, but he had just left an unsuccessful start-up himself.
Did he want to sign up again for the crazy world of a start-up so soon?

Why not?

“Do you need a cofounder?”
Gruber asked the two men at the end of the meeting.

The core of the team that would build Siri was now in place.

I
ndependently, the three Siri founders had already spent a lot of time pitching investors in the area for funding for earlier projects.
In the past, this had been an onerous chore for Gruber, since it required countless visits to venture capitalists who were often uninterested, arrogant, or both.
This time their connection to SRI opened the doors to the Valley’s blue-chip venture firms.
Dag Kittlaus was a master showman, and on their tour of the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road, he developed a witty and charming pitch.
He would take Cheyer and
Gruber in tow to each fund-raising meeting.
The men would then be escorted into a conference room and after they introduced themselves, Kittlaus innocently asked the VCs, “Hey, do any of you have one of those newfangled smartphones?”
The VCs thrust their hands in their pockets and almost always retrieved Apple’s then-brand-new iPhone.

“Do you have the latest apps downloaded?”
Kittlaus asked.

Yes.

“Do you have Google search?”

Of course!

Kittlaus then placed a twenty-dollar bill on the table and told the VCs, “If you can answer three questions in five minutes, you can walk away with my money.”
He then asked the VCs three questions, the answers to which were difficult to search on Google or other similar apps.
The venture capitalists listened to the questions and then either said, “Oh, I don’t have that app,” or made their way through multiple browser pages, following various hyperlinks in an effort to synthesize an answer.
Inevitably, the VCs failed to answer even one of the questions in the time allowed, and Kittlaus never lost his money.

It was a clever way for the team to force the potential investors to visualize the need for the missing Siri application.
To help them, the team put together fake magazine covers.
One of them read: “The End of Search—Enter the Age of the Virtual Personal Assistant.”
Another one featured an image of Siri crowding Google off the magazine cover.
The Siri team also built slides to explain that the Google search was not the end point in the world of information retrieval.

Ultimately the team would be vindicated.
Google was slow to come to a broader, more conversational approach to gathering and communicating information.
Eventually, however, the search giant would come around to a similar approach.
In May of 2013, Amit Singhal, head of the company’s “Knowledge” group, which includes search technology, kicked off a product
introduction by proclaiming “the end of search as we know it.”
Four years after Siri had arrived, Google acknowledged that the future of search was conversation.
Cheyer’s jaw hit the floor when he heard the presentation.
Even Google, a company that was all about data, had moved away from static search and in the direction of assistance.

Until they toured Sand Hill for venture capital, Adam Cheyer had been skeptical that the venture community would buy into their business case.
He kept waiting for VCs to toss them out of their meetings, but it never happened.
At this point, other companies had released less-impressive voice control systems that had gone bust.
General Magic, the once high-flying handheld computing Apple spin-off, for example, had tried its hand as a speech-based personal assistant before going out of business in 2002.
Gradually, however, Cheyer realized that if the team could develop a really good technical assistant, the venture capitalists and the money would follow.

The team had started looking for money in late 2007 and they were funded before the end of that year.
They had initially visited Gary Morgenthaler, one of Silicon Valley’s elder statesmen and an influential SRI contact, for advice, but Morgenthaler liked the idea so much that he invited them back to pitch.
In the end, the team picked Morgenthaler and Menlo Ventures, another well-known venture firm.

Before the dot-com era, companies kept their projects under wraps until they were ready to announce their developments at grand publicity events, but that changed during the Silicon Valley buildup to the bubble in the late 1990s.
There was a new spirit of openness among more service-oriented new companies, which shared information freely and raced to be first to market.
The Siri developers, however, decided to stay quiet; they even used the domain name stealth-company.com as a placeholder and a tease.
They found office space in San Jose, far away from the other software start-ups that frequently settled in San Francisco.
Having a base in San Jose also made
it easy to find new talent.
At the time, technical workers with families were moving to the south end of the Peninsula, and commuting to downtown San Jose was a breeze compared to the trek to Mountain View or Palo Alto.

To build the company culture, Adam Cheyer went out and bought picture frames and handed them out to all of the company’s employees.
He asked everyone to choose a hero and then put a framed picture of that person on their desks.
Then, he asked them to pick a quote that exemplified why that person was important to them.
Cheyer hoped this would serve two purposes: it would be interesting to see who people chose, and it would also reflect something about each employee.
Cheyer chose Engelbart and attached an early commitment made by the pioneering SRI researcher: “As much as possible, to boost mankind’s collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.”
For Cheyer, the quote perfectly expressed the tension between automating and augmenting the human experience.
He had always harbored a tiny feeling of guilt about his work as he moved between what he thought of as “people-based” systems and artificial intelligence–based projects.
His entire career had vacillated between the two poles.
It was 2007, the year that he also helped his friends start the activist site change.org, which fell squarely within the Engelbart tradition, and he believed that Siri was moving along the same path.
Gruber had wanted to choose Engelbart as well, but when Cheyer chose him first he fell back on his musical hero, Frank Zappa.