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.
One Voice Technologies
One Voice is credited for launching the software industry's first Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) in 1999 when they officially released IVAN. IVAN was an AI based personal assistant that allowed users to use conversational voice to find information on the Internet, including weather, news, sports scores, financial information and to purchase items from online retailers. IVAN was the predecessor to several of today's IPA's, including Siri, Amazon Echo, Google Now and Cortana. One Voice's patent portfolio, which powered IVAN, was acquired by Apple in 2010, prior to Apple's launch of Siri and is referenced in patents ranging from Google, Microsoft, IBM, Nuance and Stanford University.