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I always felt that Siri was named with the intent that it could be used as a wake word (so you could say "Siri what's the weather today?") because Siri itself is a rare given name and [si ri] are sounds rarely said at the beginning of a sentence.

And then at some point Apple realized they had to make a longer wake word to cut down the number of false positives ("Siri" -> "Hey Siri", from 2 syllables to 3).

Google probably went through the same process ("Google" -> "Okay Google", from 2 syllables to 4).

Amazon probably deliberately chose a 3 syllable name with "Alexa" for the same reason.

I can imagine future improvements where we can have the originally imagined wake words "Siri", "Google" and "Alexa", and at that point I would be most happy with "Siri" because it would be short and not-corporate.



Siri (the company) was a spin-off from SRI – Stanford Research Institute.

The initial product, before the Apple acquisition, was an iPhone app with a chat interface. I don't recall that it supported voice input.

It is still possible that the founders were thinking ahead to voice input and wake words when they named the company.


The technology was initially developed under the DARPA CALO research program (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO).


It's my understanding Siri came from SRI Labs and who sold the technology to Apple.


> and [si ri] are sounds rarely said at the beginning of a sentence.

seriously?


Yes, because the first two phonetic syllables of "Seriously" are [sɪ rɪə], which makes it different.




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