iPhone Quiz: What Does Siri Really Mean?

Have you wondered how Apple ever arrived at the name Siri for its voice-activated personal assistant in iPhones? Ever considered just what Siri means, but it was never worth your time to actually ask Siri for the answer to that question?

We can save you the time and tell you now. The short answer is the Siri stands for Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, but there's a more poetic meaning behind the software's name.

TechCrunch reports that Siri, before it became an Apple product, was a company that developed an app co-founded by Dag Kittlaus. Siri as we know it now was acquired by Apple in 2010. Kittlaus tells TechCrunch more on the original meaning of the name he chose when helped create the app and Siri, Inc. in 2007:

Siri means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian and Kittlaus owned the siri.com domain. He was planning on naming a child after said beautiful woman but his first child was a boy. Instead, he named his product after her.

Once Apple bought the company, Kittlaus was brought into Apple HQ to speak to Scott Forstall. After a bit of hemming and hawing, he was sent to meet with Steve Jobs in secret.

"And he wanted me to come over to his house the next day, and I did, and I spent 3 hours with him in front of his fireplace having this surreal conversation about the future. And, you know, he talked about why Apple was going to win, and we talked about how Siri was doing. And he was very excited about the fact that. You know, he was very interested in this area in general but, you know, they’re patient, they don’t jump on anything until they feel they can go after something new and he felt that we cracked it. So that was his attraction."