Dag Kittlaus is a native Chicagoan and founder of Siri, the virtual personal assistant for mobile devices that launched three years ago last week. Last night he joined 1871 for their Founder Stories event where he shared his how he brought Siri, now a quintessential part of the iPhone, to life.
Despite a lack of background in engineering or even tech, Dag was able to bring the futuristic concept of Siri to market. “You don’t need to be an engineer to get exited about or understand technology. It’s a matter of will,” he said.
His journey in tech began when he read article on airplane in 1994 and became obsessed with learning about Internet Protocol. When he learned about IP he realized it was going to ruin his current business. In an effort to say ahead of the curve he became an expert the subject. “It’s smart to think out 3-5 years. That's how you get your best ideas,” he said. Dag has followed this model for this entire career.
Before the iPhone, you used to buy a phone for the hardware: the software wasn’t great but users didn’t expect it to be. When the iPhone came out everything changed and the value proposition shifted from being hardware driven to software focused. It was during this revolutionary time that Dag was working to develop Siri.
“If you could talk to a computer and it understood you and could do things for you—we wanted to launch a product that took advantage of that,” Dag said, when explaining the original inspiration for Siri.
