Andre Yoskowitz
28 Mar 2012 19:43
According to VentureBeat, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was never a fan of the name "Siri" for the company's virtual assistant technology.
Dag Kittlaus, the co-founder of Siri, says Jobs was very reluctant with keeping the name when it came time to integrate it into the iPhone 4S, but eventually signed off.
Kittlaus says Siri means "beautiful woman who leads you to victory" in Norwegian, and it also happened to be the name he was going to give his daughter, until he ended up having a baby boy. The name always stuck, however, and was first in his mind when it came time to name the software.
This was not the first time that Jobs was resistant to a name that later became iconic. Jobs famously disliked the name 'iPod' before it went on to define an era of digital music.
Says Kittlaus of his interaction with Jobs:
Three weeks after we launched I got a call in the office from someone at Apple that said, 'Scott Forstall wants to talk to you and he's the head software guy.'
And I said sure?
Only it wasn't Scott that called it was Steve. And Steve never announces where he's gonna be and what he's gonna do because there's too much commotion around it. So he said, 'Dag, this is Steve Jobs.'
And he wanted me to come over to his house the next day, and I did, and I spent 3 hours with him in front of his fireplace having this surreal conversation about the future.
And, you know, he talked about why Apple was going to win, and we talked about how Siri was doing. And he was very excited about the fact that.. you know, he was very interested in this area in general but, you know, they're patient, they don't jump on anything until they feel they can go after something new and he felt that we cracked it. So that was his attraction.
I ended up very lucky, timing wise. I got to work with him for a year before he got real sick. And he's pretty incredible. The stories are true. All of the stories.