哈佛商业评论

How We Did It

LEADERSHIP

The President of SRI Ventures on BringingSiri to Life

Norman Winarsky | page 106

The market vision that led to Siri, thevirtual personal assistant that’s now an integral part of Apple’s iPhone, canbe traced back to 2003, when a mobile phone’s primary applications were stilllimited to ringtones and messaging. The author and his colleagues at SRIInternational recognized that the phone’s growing capabilities would eventuallyput a communicating supercomputer in everyone’s pocket. They believed thattheir company was well suited to be a leader in the inevitable technology andmarket revolution—as it had been in every previous computing revolution.

They didn’t originally plan to create astand-alone venture. They talked to dozens of telecom carriers and handsetproviders, with the aim of jointly starting a project that would license thetechnology. But because the few resulting commercial projects implemented onlysmall parts of its original vision, the founding team decided to drop that ideaand create and build its own venture. Speech-to-text was the easy part: SRI hadlaunched Nuance, a world leader in speech solutions. The hard part wasanalyzing words so as to understand the user’s intent and then reason about andanswer the request. The runaway success of Siri demonstrates how well the teammet that challenge.

HBR Reprint R1509A