Siri in the iPhone
A voice assistant became a built-in part of the phone, and millions of people addressed a machine in a sentence rather than a button for the first time.
Why it matters
Talking to a device became ordinary, a decade before machines could actually answer with substance.
Apple presented Siri the day before Steve Jobs died. Its real range was narrower than expectations: the assistant set alarms well and understood most else poorly. The gap between the presentation and what worked shaped a sceptical view of voice assistants for years. The habit of speaking to a device nevertheless took hold then.