The Origins of Vangie the Pinoy Siri

Vangie, the Pinoy Siri

It started out as a joke. A group of officemates could not get Siri, the voice command system of the Apple iPhone 4S, to understand their commands. They played around with the idea of a Filipino version called “Vangie” and cracked more jokes about different Pinoy commands and the responses it could deliver. If this was a normal office Vangie would have just stayed as an idea, doomed to eventually be forgotten. But all this happened in the office of Gung Ho Films Manila, a new production outfit based in Makati, and the fun banter turned into a brainstorming session that brought Vangie to life.

“Vangie was born out of creative wedlock. There was no legitimate plan. It was in the heat of a an A-Ha moment when this sexy new gadget came along but apparently was too unfamiliar with Pinoy foreplay,” shares Lizanne Padilla-Alcazaren, Managing Director of Gung Ho Films Manila, in an e-mail interview with New Media PH.

Vangie was in luck because the group that conceived her did not only have creativity but also the skills, experience and expertise to make it all happen. Following their brainstorming, Gung Ho Films formed a team to write the script, shoot the scenes, edit the video, and upload it on YouTube.

Paolo Dy, Director and Creator of Vangie, was ecstatic with how everything came together. “We all started throwing ideas around about what a Vangie would do: she would understand jejemon talk, she’d help you cook Pinoy-style spaghetti, she’d have a snatcher-detection feature, and she’d have this brash, earthy personality that worked on loads of cariño-brutal. From script to uploaded film, it took us one week. Three days later we had a million views!“

The team behind Vangie: Gung Ho Films Manila

The rest, as they say, is history. The video now has over 1,000,000 views as of this writing, and it has the potential to grow even more especially since Gung Ho has plans of creating more videos for Vangie. What’s refreshing to hear is that there’s no grand masterplan behind Vangie. The Gung Ho Films Manila executives share that the entire viral process is a collaboration between them and their audience.

“We have our own ideas about where we want to take Vangie, but as with all viral efforts, we’re responding to the ebb and flow of the public’s response to her, sometimes hour by hour. It’s a wonderful give and take, but rest assured that Vangie will be there making her fans laugh for quite some time to come,” says Paolo.

“Vangie will entertain and reek of sarcasm but will send out not so subtle messages of how to deal with the quirks of Filipino life, thus the line Fix your life,” adds Lizanne.

It looks like we haven’t seen the last of Vangie and we’ll be seeing more videos in the next few weeks. Who knows? Maybe someday when Apple releases the Siri API we will actually see Vangie become truly part of our everyday life as an iOS application.

For the full interview click here.