Featured Image Credit: CNN
Topics: Apple, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, iPhone
Ella Scott
Since its launch in 2011, Apple's voice-activated digital assistant Siri has grown to be an essential tool for an estimated 500 million users worldwide.
Many use the intelligent feature to call friends, scribe messages while driving, and even make them laugh on down days.
Now, if we say the name Susan Bennett, do you know what her connection to Siri is?
No, she’s not the creator—that’s Stanford Research Institute cohorts Adam Cheyer, Dag Kittlaus, and Tom Gruber, who sold the technology to Steve Jobs at Apple in 2010.
Instead, Bennett is actually the person who provided an American female voice for Siri when it was introduced on the iPhone 4S.
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However, it actually took her two years to admit to being the woman behind Siri—but why?
Well, during an appearance on CNN, Bennett revealed the original recordings were done as ‘text to speech voices’ for a company called ScanSoft in July 2005.
Instead of being tasked to say common phrases like ‘Thanks for calling’ and ‘Please dial one’, the gig required her to utter phrases that hit various vowel and consonant combinations.
These included nonsense sentences like ‘Cow hoist in the tug hut today’ and ‘Say shift fresh issue today’, as well as various addresses and street names.
“I recorded from home four hours a day, five days a week for the entire month of July.
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“The first hundred or so were fun and interesting, but it got pretty tiring after that,” she told Business Insider.
Bennett - who began her voiceover acting career by ‘accident’ - previously had credits in radio and television commercials as well as narration, but no experience in virtual assistant voicing.
“This was something very different,” she told the CNN broadcasters, admitting it was the first time in two years that she’d publicly shared she was the voice of Siri.
This was because she previously didn’t want to be defined or ‘pigeonholed’ by the career move.
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Bennett only realised she was the voice of Siri six years after completing the task for ScanSoft (now Nuance Communications).
It’s understood she received an out-of-the-blue message from another voiceover actor, who claimed they were ‘playing around with a new iPhone’.
They’d heard Siri’s voice and wanted to know whether the AI assistant was their friend’s work.
“I had no idea what they were talking about,” the creative admitted.
“I went straight to Apple's website to listen and knew immediately that it was my voice.”
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According to Bennett, Apple never actually paid her for her voice.
This was because she originally did the gig through ScanSoft, who later reportedly sold the recordings to the tech giants.
Interestingly, she wasn’t the only person that this happened to.
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John Briggs, who voiced the original British version of Siri, and Karen Jacobsen, the inaugural Australian Siri, also made recordings in 2005, only to wind up on Apple devices across the globe years later.
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Despite claiming it was a ‘strange situation’, Bennett took the non-payment from Apple in stride.
Realising she didn’t have to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with the company, she decided to promote herself.
“I've been featured on TV shows, given a TEDx Talk, and spoken on the radio,” she confessed to Business Insider.
“It's not something I ever would've seen myself doing 15 years ago, but it's been really fun,” she added.
However, she claimed there is ‘no way to measure the downside or the work’ she may have lost as a result of the job.
“But I like to look at the positive side. It's really been fun ‘being’ Siri.
“It's really given me a lot of really wonderful opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise, so no complaints here.”
She added that if everyone who had an iPhone would send her a dollar, it would be ‘pretty good compensation’.
Bennett’s voice was used on the iPhone right up until the iOS 7 update was released on September 18, 2013.
Now, there are multiple Siri voices available, including four British and two Irish options.