The story of Siri and Dag Kittlaus

If you have an Apple iPhone you are no doubt familiar with Siri.

Siri is pretty cool technology. You ask it for something and it gets it for you. It is one of the pieces of technology that you use and not fully taking in how cool it is, you forget that it is the sort of thing that appeared in sci-fi films of the 1970s. It even ha has a sense of humour, with an entire Tumblr existing that is devoted to funny sayings by the personal assistant.

Anyway Siri has a connection to the Nordics, a close connection, as it was created a team that included Norwegian Dag Kittlaus.

Kittlaus, who formerly worked at mobile phone giant Motorola, was part of the trio that included Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber. The three of them worked on it from 2007-2009, with Kittlaus said to have seen the commercial opportunities of a technology built by Cheyer.

The company was eventually acquired by Apple for an impressive $200 million (£130.2 million), with Apple integrating it into its iOS operating system.

Despite hailing from Norway Kittlaus now lives in the USA, in the city of Chicago with his wife and family. In this profile Kittlaus addresses the rumour that the company was named after Norwegian weatherwoman Siri Kalvig.

In fact he says that he was supposed to name his first child Siri as he was expecting a daughter but as he had a son he instead decided to name the technology Siri.

Kittlaus himself is staying busy since hitting the jackpot with Siri, and is now working on an AI project named Viv Labs together with two members of the team he worked on Siri with. The company recently raised an impressive $12.5 million to help fund the development of the technology.

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