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.
Voice user interface
Apple added Voice Control to its family of iOS devices as a new feature of iPhone OS 3. The iPhone 4S, iPad 3, iPad Mini 1G, iPad Air, iPad Pro 1G, iPod Touch 5G and later, all come with a more advanced voice assistant called Siri. Voice Control can still be enabled through the Settings menu of newer devices. Siri is a user independent built-in speech recognition feature that allows a user to issue voice commands. With the assistance of Siri a user may issue commands like, send a text message, check the weather, set a reminder, find information, schedule meetings, send an email, find a contact, set an alarm, get directions, track your stocks, set a timer, and ask for examples of sample voice command queries. In addition, Siri works with Bluetooth and wired headphones.