If Verizon had its way, Siri would have been Android’s marquee feature - Ars Technica

In early 2010, Apple bought a company that made a popular iOS app called Siri. Its “intelligent assistant” features were incorporated into iOS 5 and made an exclusive feature of the iPhone 4S when it launched in 2011. While Siri has become synonymous with Apple thanks to its inclusion in the latest iOS devices, though, it almost became a marquee feature of every Android smartphone sold by Verizon.

According to a new Huffington Post report detailing Siri’s rise from a DARPA-funded research project into the voice-based helper we know and love (or hate) today, Verizon had inked a deal in late 2009 to make Siri a default app on all new Android devices set to launch in 2010. Verizon was already making commercials showing off Siri’s abilities on Android, according to HuffPo, when Steve Jobs came calling in February 2010.

Siri had just launched its namesake app on the App Store three weeks earlier. Jobs called Siri CEO and cofounder Dag Kittlaus, asking for a meeting the next day.

“The way that Steve described it, speech recognition—and how to use it to create a speech interface for something like the iPhone—was an area of interest to him and Scott Forstall for some time,” Kittlaus told HuffPo. “The story that I’m told is that he thought we’d cracked that paradigm with our simple, conversational interface.”