Siri, the voice assistant for iphone, comes from the name of a Norwegian woman. Siri means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian.
It’s Siri co-founder Dage Ketters. Ketters originally planned to refer to the name of a former colleague, named her daughter Siri, and even registered the domain name siri.com. But after his wife gave birth to a son, the site was put on hold. But when Ketters was about to launch his compelling speech recognition technology, he re-enabled Siri. He said: “Consumer products companies need to make product names easy to read and write.”
Jobs took Kettlers to his home in Cupertino, San Francisco. In front of the fireplace, the two chatted about future technology issues for three hours. Ketters said: “He talked about why Apple will win, and we also talked about how Siri will develop in the future. He thinks we have seized the direction of future development.” In April 2010, Apple acquired at a price of 200 million yuan. Siri makes it impossible to provide Siri applications for other mobile phone operating systems. But there is a problem, Jobs does not like the name.
Ketters worked at Apple until October 2011, during which he tried to convince the stubborn Jobs to accept that Siri was a great name. But in the end, Apple retained the name for a more direct reason: no one can think of a better one.
