During this months Technori Pitch, which is a monthly event where Chicago-based start-ups can showcase what they have been working on, there was someone special who gave a keynote. As reported by NetworkWorld this special person was none other than Dag Kittlaus who co-founded Siri. During Kittlaus’ presentation on entrepreneurship, he briefly touched on the history of Siri. Mentioning that Steve Jobs was actually not a fan of the name Siri, but because he could not think a better name they ended up just sticking with the name.
Are you wondering just how the name Siri came about though? Well, if you are then you will be glad to know that Kittlaus went into detail on the matter:
"So Siri means in Norwegian, “beautiful woman who leads you to victory”.
I worked with a lady named Siri in Norway and wanted to name my daughter Siri and the domain was available. And also consumer companies need to focus on the fact that the name is easy to spell, is easy to say…"
If you have been keeping up on your Apple history you would also realize that Steve Jobs was originally not a fan of the iMac and iPod line. Once again however, as he was unable to think of alternative names the fruit company went ahead with the names. It looks like convincing Jobs on the name Siri was no easy task though, as Dag Kittlaus needed to constantly tell Jobs “it’s a great name.”
Another interesting tid-bit of information that was shared was how Apple first showed interested in Siri in early 2012:
"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.
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