Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer leaves Apple, sources say

“Adam Cheyer, an engineer who helped build the Siri voice-recognition software that was acquired by Apple Inc., is no longer working for the iPhone maker, according to three people familiar with the situation,” Jonathan Erlichman and Adam Satariano report for Bloomberg. “Cheyer, a Siri co-founder and its former vice president of engineering, left recently after working in Apple’s mobile software group, said one of the people, who all asked not to be identified as the matter is confidential.”

“The departure is at least the second among Siri’s founding team since Apple bought the company in April 2010 and follows the departure of Chief Executive Officer Dag Kittlaus last year,” Erlichman and Satariano report. “Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said earlier this year that while Siri is one of the most popular features of the iPhone 4S, ‘there’s more that it can do. We have a lot of people working on this,’ Cook said at the D10 conference in May when asked about the glitches. ‘And I think you will be really pleased with some of the things you’re going to see over the coming months.'”

Read more in the full article here.


      1. Microsoft is pleased to welcome Adam Cheyer to our team and we also look forward to welcoming several other Apple employees looking to work for Microsoft in the next few weeks.


      1. No, it’s just hard to when you have responsiblities of overseeing other tasks. I’m sure he is very wealthy but wants to spend his time elsewhere or doesn’t want to keep working on the same thing.

    1. AI (artificial intelligence) has advanced at a glacial pace, relative to all the EuPHoRic past predictions of its progress. I hope Adam Cheyer is able to continue working in the field and help it advance. Siri clearly has been a milestone.

  1. Ignorance Garbage Removal:
    …who helped build the Siri voice-recognition software

    As @Agent Provocateur stated above:
    Siri itself does NOT perform voice recognition, at all, ever.

    Speech recognition is performed by software from Nuance, aka Dragon. What you get on your iPhone is Siri in entirety. Siri is essentially pointless without ADDED voice recognition. This why what you speak to Siri must first be transmitted over the Internet to a server running Nuance/Dragon. The translated ASCII text is then sent back to Siri, which then acts as an ‘Expert System’ AI (Artificial Intelligence).

    Siri then uses Apple’s text-to-speech technology (which was introduced with the very first Macintosh back in 1984) to speak the query results to the user.

    No Nuance = no Siri, unless you’d rather type in your queries. Much as I love Apple, their speech recognition system hasn’t progressed much beyond the original implementation of PlainTalk, which is to say it’s extremely limited. So thank you Nuance/Dragon.

    Thankfully, Apple has progressed their text-to-speech system considerably over the past couple decades. I continue to like it better than every other text-to-speech system I’ve encountered. Have pity on poor Dr. Stephen Hawking whose stuck using a PC.

    1. I must apologize and improve my lecture above by pointing out that:
      • After your speech has been sent to a Nuance server and recognized, the text is next sent off to an Internet Siri server where the answer to your query is calculated and answered with a text response. It is THAT text which is then sent back to Siri on your iPhone and spoken to you via Apple’s text-to-speech system.

  2. Probably didn’t want to work on AI anymore. Tim Cook said Apple was doubling-down on Siri. Why would he leave if he wanted to work on Siri and AI. Probably wanted to relax a little or work on something new.

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