Want to know Siri’s backstory? All you have to do is ask the right questions. The engineers responsible for creating Apple’s virtual personal assistant Siri built in a number of fun Easter Eggs, or hidden features that can be discovered by asking specific questions or giving certain commands. Apple has continued to add even more fun new features as it continues to develop Siri, but perhaps one of the most interesting Siri Easter Eggs is one that has been present since the very beginning — but has yet to be uncovered.
Buried within Yukari Iwatani Kane’s new book titled Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, a chat with one of Siri’s early engineers reveals an interesting Easter Egg that has not been widely covered before.
“We developed a backstory for Siri to make sure everything that it said was consistent, and as part of that, we had to answer questions like, is Siri a man or a woman?” Siri engineer Adam Cheyer told Iwatani Kane. “Is it human, a machine, an alien? Is it an Apple employee? What is its relationship with respect to Apple?”
What are the questions that will reveal Siri’s backstory? As Cult of Mac noted, no one knows for the time being. Siri began as a DARPA-backed project and was later acquired by Apple for deep iOS integration. If you want to dig any deeper than that, you’ll have to figure out the right questions and ask Siri nicely.
