Siri has been getting a lot of hype over the past year. It's an as yet unreleased product that aims to be a "Virtual Personal Assistant" (VPA). At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with two of the founders of Siri: Dag Kittlaus (CEO) and Tom Gruber (CTO). I was informed that the product will launch end of summer U.S. time - starting out as an iPhone app, but later other platforms will be supported. The iPhone app will go into private beta July/August time period, then launch in Q4 2009 or Q1 2010.
Siri has been preparing for this for some time now. While the product is still more promise than substance, I at least got to look at some real-life iPhone demos in San Jose.
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Before we go any further: there is bad news for international users. Siri told me that the product will be US only for some time, which they claimed was due to the ecosystem of services it will utilize (Yelp, Google Maps and similar services). For international users, including this author, sadly we won't get to use Siri until the end of 2010 at the earliest!