SRI International
In December 2007, SRI launched a spin-off company, Siri Inc., which Apple acquired in April 2010. In October 2011, Apple announced the Siri personal assistant as an integrated feature of the Apple iPhone 4S. Siri's technology was born from SRI's work on the DARPA-funded CALO project, described by SRI as the largest artificial intelligence project ever launched. Siri was co-founded in December 2007 by Dag Kittlaus (CEO), Adam Cheyer (vice president, engineering), and Tom Gruber (CTO/vice president, design), together with Norman Winarsky (vice president of SRI Ventures). Investors included Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.
Siri
Siri's speech recognition engine was provided by Nuance Communications, a speech technology company. This was not officially acknowledged by Apple nor Nuance for years, until Nuance CEO Paul Ricci confirmed the information at a 2011 technology conference. The speech recognition system makes use of sophisticated machine learning techniques, including convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory.