Longreads

How Apple's voice-recognition software got its start—and how it lost some of its power along the way:

"This Siri -- the Siri of the past -- offers a glimpse at what the Siri of the future may provide, and a blueprint for how a growing wave of artificially intelligent assistants will slot into our lives. The goal is a human-enhancing and potentially indispensable assistant that could supplement the limitations of our minds and free us from mundane and tedious tasks.

"Siri's backers know Apple's version of the assistant has not yet lived up to its potential. 'The Siri team saw the future, defined the future and built the first working version of the future,' says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to invest in Siri. 'So it’s disappointing to those of us that were part of the original team to see how slowly that’s progressed out of the acquired company into the marketplace.'"

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along…

GQ’s Sean Fennessey: My Top Longreads of 2011 Sean Fennessey is the editor of GQ.com. (See more stories on his Longreads page.) I’ll try to follow a few guidelines for the sake of…