PullString

» see pullstring.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Oren Jacob was Pixar's chief technologist for twenty years and the supervising technical director on Finding Nemo. Martin Reddy was a Pixar lead engineer, and for five years before that he worked at SRI's AI Center, the lab that produced Siri. In 2011 the two of them incorporated a company in Delaware called ToyTalk, and across four Form D filings they raised $43,581,788, which the press rounded to $44 million. The rename to PullString went through on 13 April 2016.

The product was called Author, and it was built for writers rather than for engineers. You wrote dialogue in something closer to a screenplay than a flowchart, and the system handled the branching and the publishing. It shipped to Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack and Kik. The best-known piece of work was a Messenger bot for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, made with the agency AKQA, in which Lieutenant Reyes talked to players directly. It took six million interactions in its first twenty-four hours and won a Gold Lion at Cannes. A Destiny 2 Alexa skill voicing Ghost took a Silver.

Author was sold to companies that had a character to license and a media budget to put behind it: Activision, Mattel, Fox, HomeAdvisor. From outside that list there was one door, the free tier, and the free tier is the thing that got a cut-off date in writing. I have never had a brand to put behind a talking character, so the only version of this I could have opened is the version that was shut first.

Apple announced the acquisition on 15 February 2019 and the figure was never published. Martin Reddy is the only member of the team whose landing is documented first-hand: his own site lists five years as a software architect in Apple's AI/ML division, on Siri architecture "deployed to over two billion devices across 40 locales". Where Oren Jacob went is not in any public record.

~ the dossier ~

~ the migration script ~

On 18 September 2017 Oren Jacob published a post titled "PullString's Voice-First Future". It reads as a strategy announcement about Alexa and Google Assistant, and the operative sentences sit near the bottom. Paying customers had already been contacted one by one. Free-tier bots would be supported "until December 1, 2017", with a migration script shipped to get the content out. The same post names the channels being abandoned by listing them as past achievements, Facebook and Skype and Slack and Kik among them.

That post is usually read as a pivot. It was also the first of this company's three separate endings, and the only one announced in advance. Converse, the replacement platform for voice, was announced on 15 November 2017 and reached general availability the following February. It stopped at version 2.0.

~ one red component ~

Converse never got an announcement of its own. The best evidence for when it stopped is PullString's own status page, captured on 19 July 2019, where Converse Server reads MAJOR OUTAGE while all nine other components read operational, and the Past Incidents strip says "No incidents reported" for every day from 4 to 18 July. Captures from 2018 show that same page listing fifteen healthy components, the Messenger and Slack and Kik integrations among them, all deleted from the list by 2019. A runtime that is down with nothing logged against it is a switch rather than a fault.

That same July is when Hello Barbie stopped answering, because the doll's speech service ran on this company's infrastructure. Mattel's support pages and this status page describe one event from two ends. The doll is where the public noticed and the status page is where it happened.

~ the domain apple keeps ~

The website died six months before the servers did. Archive headers show PullString moved off its live CMS onto a static copy of itself, and the file written at 14:09:11 GMT on 23 January 2019 served byte-identical at 61,620 bytes until the last capture ever taken of the domain, on 27 July 2019. The nav lost Blog and Publications between the evening of 21 January and the morning of the 22nd, twenty-four days before Apple's announcement. The company's last tweet is dated 19 December 2018, so the account never acknowledged the acquisition or the shutdown, while toytalk.tumblr.com still answers today under the title PullString with the 2016 rename as its final post. The domain sits on Apple's own nameservers with no address records, registered since 1999 and renewed through December 2026. The frozen homepage was still inviting visitors to "Bring your idea to life in minutes!" for six months after the thing behind the button had stopped.

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