Would Siri not have worked if the company hadn't been in stealth? Google and Microsoft had already been working on speech technologies at this point. In fact,

Would Siri not have worked if the company hadn't been in stealth? Google and Microsoft had already been working on speech technologies at this point. In fact, Google was already integrating voice into Android in 2008, well before Siri had a personal assistant. Microsoft has to date failed to capitalize on their significant investments in speech recognition in any meaningful way. Siri seems more successful in speech technology than Microsoft, despite Microsoft's heavy investment and more than a decade of trying to make it work for them. If anything, this seems like proof that execution is what counts. What about the idea, then? Would Google have cared that Siri was launching a personal assistant if they knew in 2009? I doubt it: they already saw natural speech as the future. Brin and Page sometimes talk about talking to computers naturally being on of their visions almost from founding. Computer personal assistants with computer voices appeared in sci-fi movies as far back as the 80s, and perhaps even farther back. This was not a new idea. It's Siri's product - the execution - that made waves in the industry. Large organizations tend not to take notice of startups with ideas. There are simply too many people with great ideas for large companies to worry about. Stealth startups may, in rare cases, be the right decision. I simply doubt the extent to which Siri's success was highly dependent on it's pre-launch stealthiness.