The New York Times talks with SRI ahead of Apple’s developer conference

Smartphone with text saying: "Go ahead, I'm listening..."

Apple’s Siri is on the cusp of a major upgrade. The technology was born at SRI.


Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is one of the most closely watched annual events in consumer technology.

Today, the big news at WWDC26 is a long-awaited overhaul of Siri — a story that begins at SRI. This groundbreaking virtual personal assistant resulted from decades of AI research in SRI labs. In 2007, SRI spun out Siri as a startup with a mission to bring AI voice assistants from the lab to the real world. Apple acquired Siri in 2010 and integrated Siri as a feature of the Apple iPhone 4S in October 2011.

“The vision was to have an assistant that can help you navigate the digital world, your activities, your interactions.” — Dimitra Vergyri

“The vision was to have an assistant that can help you navigate the digital world, your activities, your interactions,” said Dimitra Vergyri, President of Information and Computing Sciences at SRI, in The New York Times.

Today’s announcement marks Apple’s biggest AI push yet. But as Vergyri notes, the real question now is: “What is the next level of capabilities that we’re getting out of this?”

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