Last Remaining Siri Co-Founder Resigns from Apple To Pursue Personal Interests

• Head of Advanced Development Group of Siri Tom Gruber who also happens to be one of the last original co-founders of the digital assistant at Apple has left the company.
• An Apple spokesperson confirmed his departure citing personal reasons including interests in photography and ocean conservation.
• The other two creators of Siri Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer left Apple in 2011 and 2012 respectively.

One of the three original co-founders of Apple’s voice assistant Siri has left the company citing personal reasons. Siri was co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber who came up with the idea of a smart digital assistant for mobile devices. Siri was originally released as an app on the App Store in 2010 before being acquired by the tech giant.

All three co-founders were offered positions in the company, but Cheyer and Kittlaus had left Apple to work on their own artificial intelligence project Viv. Viv was acquired by Samsung in 2016 and went on to be transformed into Samsung’s current digital assistant Bixby. While Siri has been regarded as one of the best digital assistants out there along with the likes of Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, Bixby has failed to create enough impact in the mobile world.

The Cupertino tech giant has been undergoing a number of changes with Apple India’s executives leaving the company as well as major changes in the search and AI departments. Gruber officially resigned recently and will be focusing on ocean conservation and personal interests in photography. Siri has received numerous updates since its release to add functionality, but the competition has been getting out of hand lately.

Apple is failing to keep up with the functionality Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa has to offer and is opening to allowing more third-party integration to stay relevant in the digital assistant competition. iOS 12 will be bringing a host of new features to Apple’s smart assistant including Siri Shortcuts that allows users to create custom tasks which can make use of third-party apps as well.

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