Apple’s Siri is a virtual personal assistant and it is amongst the primary feature that comes in any of the company’s products. The brainchild of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, this distinctive voice on iPhones does all the possible tasks it is assigned with … may that be reminding the user of a meeting at a particular time or informing them about the weather. Siri even gives you the best and funny philosophical bits of advice on life. As Apple’s senior vice president Phil Schiller pitched it initially, Siri is probably the “coolest feature of the iPhone 4S,” at the time of the launch.
But, a very few know that the original voice behind Siri is a 67-year-old Atlanta-based singer named Susan Bennett.
When Bennett was finalised for the voice of Siri, she was not even an iPhone user back then. She was working with a recording company and usually, the voice artists weren’t informed where their work would be used. It did not take long for her to realize that she will be the voice of the first of its kind digital assistant named Siri.
Bennett — who was hired by an Atlanta-based voice-recording company GM Voices, used to spend around four hours every day, five days a week reading out random sentences and phrases since 2005.
Bennett’s peculiar voice was picked up and further developed by a Menlo Park-based non-profit research institute called SRI International. The organisation is primarily known for building the first computer mouse prototype back in 1964. They reportedly launched Siri in Apple’s App Store following which; they received a call from Steve Jobs who made an offer to buy Siri off. Soon enough, Siri became America’s most-wanted voice.
“Most people don’t really pay attention to such voices because they are listening only for information. But if that voice becomes a persona like Siri, people seem to develop quite a relationship with it,” Bennett was reported as saying. “It was the first concatenated voice (synthesized voice) that sounded human. The astounding thing behind this was the technology,” she added.
With the release of iOS 7, Apple changed Siri’s voice by hiring new people with different accents and voices. However, Bennett’s contribution remained unaltered.
Apple, however, hasn’t confirmed that Bennett is the original voice of Siri.