The President of SRI Ventures on Bringing Siri to Life

Siri is the virtual personal assistant that's now an integral part of Apple's iPhone. Siri's founders developed a smartphone application that could understand and answer questions using natural language. In this article, the president of SRI Ventures discusses bringing Siri to life. The founding team of SRI met almost daily in SRI's venture space to discuss the market and product possibilities. They knew that to succeed they needed four major ingredients: a solution to a large and important problem or pain point, with potential for rapid market growth; a differentiated technology that would trump the competition; a team capable of outstanding execution; and a value proposition and business plan that would articulate the venture's strategy and value. Without all four, the probability of success would be nearly zero. The breakthrough idea behind Siri was simple and powerful: In contrast to search engines, Siri would be a voice-driven "do engine". It would understand a query, automatically access the information needed, and distill it into an answer.