Apple’s Siri is one of the best-known AI assistants around, but it could’ve ended up being called Mia or Via.
Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri along with Dag Kittlaus and Tom Gruber, recently shared a fascinating origin story about how the voice assistant got its iconic name. In a LinkedIn post, Cheyer revealed that while Siri was ultimately their top choice, the decision wasn’t without considering some compelling alternatives—and the reasoning behind the final selection offers insight into the careful branding considerations that went into launching what would become one of the world’s first mainstream AI assistants.
“Siri was our top choice,” Cheyer explained. “But other names in contention were Mia (My Intelligent Assistant) and Via (Virtual Intelligent Assistant).” The team had to weigh practical and strategic factors for each option. Mia, while memorable and personal, came with a significant obstacle: “Mia was too expensive (a woman in Miami wanted $200K for it!) and would have looked bad if our assistant’s servers ever went down (Missing In Action).”
Via presented a different set of considerations. “Via could have been not bad, because we were all about getting things done, and you might say you got it done Via…” Cheyer noted. However, the name didn’t quite capture the essence of what they were building.
Siri, by contrast, proved to be the perfect fit on multiple levels. “Siri was the right name for us,” Cheyer said. “The official meaning is ‘Beautiful woman who leads you to victory’ from a Norse goddess metaphor, and it also means ‘secret’ in Swahili (a tip of the hat back to our stealth company days).” This multilayered significance—combining empowerment, guidance, and a nod to the company’s secretive development phase—made Siri the clear winner.
The naming decision reflects broader trends in how tech companies approach AI branding. Unlike corporate-sounding alternatives, Siri’s human-like name helped make voice technology feel more approachable and conversational when it launched in 2011. This strategy has since been widely adopted: Amazon chose Alexa, Google initially went with the more functional “Google Assistant” before considering more personified options, and Microsoft selected Cortana (named after an AI character from the Halo video game series). The success of these assistants has often correlated with how natural and trustworthy they feel to users—something that starts with the name itself. Apple’s bet on Siri as a name that conveyed both capability and warmth proved prescient, helping establish voice assistants as an everyday technology rather than a novelty feature.