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On its birthday, Siri’s U.S. voice actress revealed, ‘I had no idea I would be on the iPhone’

[cnnvideo url=’http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2013/10/02/siri-susan-bennett-red-chair-ideas-orig-jtb.cnn’ inline=’true’]

An Atlanta woman has come forward to CNN as the U.S. voice of Siri, the built-in “personal assistant” first introduced in the iPhone 4S. Susan Bennett says she first discovered that her voice was being used on Apple’s smartphones when a friend emailed her and asked if it was her voice on the iPhone commercial. She headed to the Apple website to discover that she had unknowingly provided the voice for the system with samples she recorded in July of 2005, a full six years before the phone’s launch.

Bennett says she had no idea that the voice samples would be used by Apple and that her work also appears on many GPS units and other devices, including the first ATM.

Previously, an Australian morning show interviewed the voice actress who provided the voice for Siri in that country. The interview can be seen below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMbtOo02ALI

Oh and today is Siri’s ‘Birthday’

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Comments

  1. Andy Shorrock - 10 years ago

    I used to work years ago for Dorling Kindersley & one of the DTP Designers there had the 1st name Siri

  2. Jim Phong - 10 years ago

    Voice samples recorded in 2005 ?? That is just plain impossible. Even if they had her speak many sentences and combos, still Siri got tweaked many times already and it surely needed more samples to achieve the correct results.

    • droidxstatic - 10 years ago

      I wouldn’t say impossible by any means. Recording voice samples for these things usually include specific groups of letters pronounced in different ways making just random sounds when by themselves, but can be pieced together to form different words or changes in the future.

    • warren merrill - 10 years ago

      The samples weren’t done for Siri, nor had anything to do with Apple. Her voice has been on Garmin GPS units since day one, as well as used for numerous other applications licensing voices from Nuance, who owns the voice rights

  3. Kevin (@RyeMAC3) - 10 years ago

    The Siri voice has been on the Mac for text to speech for years. I immediately recognized the voice as that of “Samantha” from OS X when Siri first came out. The voice samples are from 2005.

  4. William - 10 years ago

    Reblogged this on William's iBlog.

  5. Jeffrey Bonacci - 10 years ago

    I thought it was Allison Duffy… http://www.wimp.com/voicesiri/

  6. Peter INova - 10 years ago

    Is there any way one can send a “tip” to Siri? Through iTunes, perhaps. And does Apple take 30% of it, the way they do for music?

  7. Miguel Rocha Jr. - 10 years ago

    Poor Koothrappali. Dreamed with some woman like Scarlett Johansson calling him Sexy and… well… he was wrong…

  8. herb02135go - 10 years ago

    CNN.com has a great profile.
    If I were her I wouldn’t want my name associated with that product.

  9. sallyedelstein - 10 years ago

    Siri’s, ..er…Susan Bennett’s snippy voice and quirky personality stands in contrast to the golden age of telephone operators who possessed “the voice with a smile”Take a look
    http://wp.me/p2qifI-1Ii

  10. varera (@real_varera) - 10 years ago

    I have liked “The Big Bang Theory” version better