Siri, the intelligent personal assistant for latest release of iPhone 4S, is actually been around for the past eight years. Siri was only recently been acquired by Apple in Mar 2010 for an undisclosed sum.
History of Siri
2003: DARPA awards SRI with a five-year contract to create an “enduring personalized cognitive assistant.” It would go on to invest $150 million in the project.
SRI calls the project CALO, short for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. The stated goal: “To create cognitive software systems, that is, systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.”
Jan. 2008: Siri, one of the consumer-branded products inspired by the CALO project, spun out of SRI as its own company.
Oct. 13, 2008: Siri announces it has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding in a round led by Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.
Nov. 24, 2009: Siri announces it has raised $15.5 mil…