ACROSS the world, people are shouting the names Siri and Alexa at their gadgets – and it’s only going to get worse. Now that humanity is resigned to talking to tech, you should probably know where Apple’s and Amazon’s virtual assistants actually got their names from. Why is Siri called Siri? Although the virtual Siri assistant lives on every iPhone, it wasn’t actually created by Apple. It was actually a spin-off project from the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center. The tech was eventually bought up by Apple for the iPhone, but Apple had no say over the name. No one has ever revealed who came up with Siri, but we do know why it was chosen. Siri co-creator Adam Cheyer said the name Siri was picked because it’s “easy to remember, short to type, comfortable to pronounce, and a not-too-common human name”. Writing in Forbes, he said: “Once Siri became the leading candidate, everyone on the team had their own favourite explanation of the meaning. “Dag Kittlaus, our Norwegian-American CEO, once considered using Siri as the name of his child and liked the Norse meaning ‘beautiful woman who leads you to victory’. “For me, Siri, which means ‘secret’ in Swahili, was a tip of the hat to our pre-named days when we began as stealth-company.com. “I also liked the fact that it was the reverse of Iris, a software system I helped build as part of the CALO project which Siri was spun out of. “Some liked the resemblance to… [Read full story]