They created Siri before Apple bought it. They’re still waiting for their original vision to come true

(CNN) — Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, known for creating an assistant that’s now found in billions of Apple devices, have been thinking about what comes after the search engine for a long time.

They, along with Tom Gruber, founded a startup in 2007 stemming from a product concept the pair developed at the Stanford Research Institute. They called it Siri and aimed to create a “do engine.”

“We used to say, ‘If you want to find a web page, go to a search engine like Google,’” Cheyer told CNN in August. “’If you want to get something done, go to a ‘do engine: Siri.’”

Siri has been an iPhone mainstay since Apple bought the company for more than $200 million, according to reports at the time, and introduced it on the iPhone 4S in 2011. But most users only use Siri for simple tasks like setting alarms or queuing up music.

The tech giant wants that to change Monday, when it begins rolling out the all-new Siri as part of its new iOS 27 software.

Siri has been rebuilt for the AI era, the company said. The new Siri AI can analyze what’s on an iPhone’s screen, operate apps, and leverage information from your calendar, messages and other iPhone apps in its responses. Apple hopes these functions will give it a leg up over rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Kittlaus and Cheyer, who are no longer involved in Siri’s development and left Apple shortly after Siri was acquired, agree that Apple’s massive App Store, the ubiquity of products like the iPhone and Apple Watch, and the company’s focus on consumer privacy could give the new AI assistant an edge in the competition.

Big Tech companies – including Apple – have tried to create an AI assistant that can handle tasks for consumers for more than a decade. But to achieve that goal, AI assistants must understand speech the way humans do and work seamlessly with the apps consumers use everyday without jeopardizing privacy.

“The whole world is going after this kind of vision,” Cheyer told CNN.

Apple in AI

Apple has been under a microscope following criticism that it’s fallen behind in AI.

The new version of Siri comes nearly four years after ChatGPT first launched. Meanwhile, Google and Samsung have woven AI tools throughout Android’s interface, such as the ability to analyze and search for content being shown on screen and make suggestions based on what you’re doing on your phone.

Kittlaus, who worked at Apple in 2010 and 2011 following Siri’s acquisition, said Apple typically prioritizes its own products and may not have had a pulse on the AI shift initially.

“I think that’s just a function of how Apple generally operates, which is they’re super focused on the next product launches,” Kittlaus said.

Apple delayed the launch of its revamped Siri last year because it said it needed more time to deliver on features announced in 2024.

Kittlaus and Cheyer both said they think Apple is well-positioned to bring Siri closer to their original vision of a “do engine.” Being able to use information from your Apple devices to answer personal questions – not just general knowledge questions one might search the internet for – could set Apple apart.

When CNN tested a beta version of Siri AI, the assistant found an upcoming dentist appointment using a confirmation text in the Messages app. It also pulled up more details about a band that a friend recommended in a text message, and sent a recipe for a cabbage salad on Instagram to the Siri app so that I could view it later when asked.

Google, which owns the Android operating system as well as popular apps like Gmail and Google Maps, has a similar advantage.

But Apple is betting that its focus on privacy will make consumers feel more comfortable trusting Siri. Apple uses a system called Private Cloud Compute for AI tasks that are too powerful to process locally; the system only sends data that’s relevant to the specific task to Apple’s servers. It’s also expanded that system to Google Cloud, since Apple uses Gemini for some of its AI features.

No longer a tech challenge

The next major obstacle for Siri and other AI assistants may be the tech industry’s business model.

Technical hurdles previously made it challenging for virtual assistants to be useful for more than setting alarms, playing music or managing smart home devices. AI helpers like Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant weren’t always very good at understanding people or answering questions unless questions were phrased in a specific way. And using AI assistants to order a pizza or book a ride from Uber requires users to manually connect it to the app. In many cases, it was easier to just complete the task yourself.

But a lot has changed over the past decade.

Large language models have made it easier for AI assistants to understand broad commands, execute multistep tasks and take actions across apps. Apple and other tech giants are working towards a future where users don’t need to open apps and can just ask an AI to handle things.

That could create big concerns for the companies making those apps, according to Kittlaus and Cheyer. If users rely on Siri, Gemini or ChatGPT for shopping, booking restaurants and travel, they may not need to open apps like Uber, Amazon, OpenTable or Airbnb as much.

Any major app would be reluctant to let “Apple rewrite and come up with a different user flow” for how consumers interact with their service, Kittlaus said.

It’s not a new conundrum: Apple and Google have a history of integrating the functions of third-party apps into their operating systems.

Apple said during its iPhone launch event last week that Siri AI already works with more than 300,000 apps, though that likely accounts for just a slice of the apps available in the App Store. The App Store had more than 2 million apps a decade ago, according to the company.

“There (are) some frictions with people moving away from each homegrown brand’s website and using agents to do that for them,” Kittlaus said.

Kittlaus said he quit Apple when Steve Jobs died, because he was concerned the vision he shared with Jobs wasn’t well understood by the company’s management. Fifteen years since Siri’s launch on the iPhone 4S, his outlook for AI assistants remains the same.

“That vision hasn’t changed one iota,” he said. “But nobody’s done it yet.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.