SIRI RISING: The Inside Story Of Siri’s Origins — And Why She Could Overshadow The iPhone

Very detailed history of Siri from Huffington Post.

At its original debut, in 2010, Siri had been able to connect with 42 different web services — from Yelp and StubHub to Rotten Tomatoes and Wolfram Alpha — then return a single answer that integrated the best details culled from those diverse sources. It had been able to buy tickets, reserve a table and summon a taxi, all without a user having to open another app, register for a separate service or place a call. It was already on the verge of “intuiting” a user’s pet peeves and preferences to the point that it would have been able to seamlessly match its suggestions to his or her personality.

Didn’t knew Siri was more powerful then.

As conceived by its creators, Siri was supposed to be a “do engine,” something that would allow people to hold conversations with the Internet. While a search engine used stilted keywords to create lists of links, a do engine could carry a conversation, then decide and act. Had one too many drinks? The ability to coordinate a Google search for a ride home might elude you, but a do engine could translate a muttered, “I’m drunk take me home,” into a command to send a car service to your location. The startup’s goal was not to build a better search engine, but to pioneer an entirely new paradigm for accessing the Internet, one that would let artificially intelligent agents summon the answers people needed, rather than pull relevant resources for humans to consult on their own. If the search engine defined the second generation of the web, Siri’s co-founders were confident the do engine would define the third.

The current status of Siri is quite stumbling, but I hope it will change the paradigm of accessing the Internect.

Also it is interesting to know that Siri had a deal with Verizon before Apple.