Hugo Barra: Lobby 7's technology powered Apple's early Siri assistant
Hugo Barra · Hugo Barra: How I Built Hardware for Android, Xiaomi, and Oculus | 20VC #947 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 9, 2022 · at 2:39
Hugo Barra, former VP of Product Management for Android, discusses the acquisition of his early voice-recognition startup Lobby 7 by Nuance.
0:00 / 0:29exact quote · 29.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Our company ran out of money, and we ended up getting, you know, actually hired by a big software company called Nuance, which was actually good because it actually gave us the runway to build and prove that vision that we had, and in the end our tech became the foundation for Apple's, you know, Siri voice assistant, and Nuance got paid a ton of money for basically processing everything that people spoke into their iPhones for the first few years of Siri before Apple finally figured it out and built everything in-house.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Hugo Barra
Chinese tech companies are generally poorly run and waste time
“This work ethic is partly what makes Chinese companies, you know, so competitive, but it's also true that Chinese companies are generally not as well run and sometimes are really messy. So a lot of the time on the ground is, Wasted by, you know, poor communica…”
Meta's Oculus Go failed due to atrocious user retention
“That product was called Oculus Go. It was a 200 dollar VR headset that was built to be kind of your everyday, you know, VR device, and it sold really well, but had absolutely atrocious retention, which means it obviously failed. And, you know, it was basically…”
Consumer hardware V1s must choose to be Feature King or Budget King
“When you're building a consumer hardware product, you have to make one important decision for V-One. You either go for customers who are willing to pay a high price for a full feature product that does the job they expect without cutting any corners, or you fo…”
Barra: Consumer hardware cannot use MVPs and must delight at V1
“There is no such a thing as MVP, you know, in the hardware world. In the hardware world, your V-One must be a delightful product for the audiences that you choose to sell it to and the job that it needs to do.”
Uninterrupted 3.5-hour interviews strip away polished executive responses
“A three and a half hour sort of grilling session where you get the person to talk about a level of detail of what they've done in their careers before, or problems that they've had to solve, or failures that they had to recover from, that they have typically n…”