Meet Raj Reddy, farmer’s son who is brain behind Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana

Voice-based AI chatbots like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Assistant are now found in every second home and nearly every device. But not many know that the man who was the brain behind the technology crucial to such intelligent chatbots.

Raj Reddy is an Indian scientist known as the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was born Dabbala Rajagopal Reddy in a village in Andhra Pradesh's Chittoor district to a farmer father and a homemaker mother.

Reddy was the first person from his family to receive college education. After becoming a civil engineer, he went on to earn a PhD in Computer Science from the prestigious American institute Stanford University in 1966.

It was at Stanford that Reddy began his research in AI. Over decades of work, Reddy and peers made several early models of robotic voice control. He is credited with inventing the first speech recognition technology named Hearsay-I.

Reddy became the first Indian and Asian to win the Turing Award, which is known as the nobel prize of Computer Science in 1994. India recognised his genius work with the Padma Bhushan honour in 2001. Reddy is currently Computer Science and Robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the US.