Siri sounds may be one of us who are familiar. Many iPhone users talk to Siri every day, but have you ever wondered where Siri sounds? While lately Apple uses luxury engine learning and computer speech to produce siri tones and inflections, back in the early days of virtual assistants, his voice is based on real people. We almost never found who the real person was, and if Apple had something to say about it, we might still not know.
Indeed, even though the voice line will eventually be used for Siri was first recorded again in 2005 – two years before the first iPhone was even launched – not almost a decade later we met the person behind the voice: Susan Bennett. Bennett revealed his role as Siri’s voice actor in the interview in 2013 with CNN, which you can see embedded below.
Bennett explained that the original performances took place in July 2005, when he spent four hours, five days a week for voice recording throughout the month for the recognition system made by a company called Scansoft (which then joined Communication Nuances). Finally, the recognition system was used by Sri International in Siri’s development after decades of research into artificial intelligence. In 2007, Sri International spun with Siri to the Mandiri business, with Dag Kittlaus, Tom Gruber, and Adam Cheyer served as a new co-founder company.
Fast forward three years later, and Siri was acquired by Apple in an agreement regulated by Steve Jobs, only two months after being launched as an independent application in the iOS App Store. Siri made his debut as an iPhone feature integrated on iPhone 4S and voice assistants had been with us since, through many ups and downs. However, it was not until 2013 that Nuance communication confirmed that his voice recognition technology was in the center of Siri, which finally allowed all the puzzle pieces from this particular mystery to unite.
Siri, of course, not only has one original voice actor. Susan Bennett is the person we know in the United States, but in England, Jon Briggs serves as a real voice of Siri, while Karen Jacobsen is Australia’s first Siri. The three recorded lines that would eventually be used for Siri in 2005, and assessing from interviews that the three of them did with the Guardian in 2015, there seemed to be no one who knew that their voice was used for Siri until afterwards used for this feature Launched on the iPhone 4S.
A very interesting thing about this is that Apple never confirms who the original voice actor for Siri. Bennett, however, was convinced that he was a genuine Siri, and after he revealed in 2013, CNN extended a audio-forensic expert who was determined to “100%” certainty that Bennett’s voice and Siri voice were the same. Apple, for his part, remained silent about Siri’s voice history, and according to Briggs even “rather underestimated” when he reached out to the company to offer his help in promoting Siri.
Maybe it won’t surprise anyone to know that Bennett is a professional voice actor, like Briggs and Jacobsen. According to the IMDB Bennett page, he has a role in several films and TV series. He was even credited in several songs on the soundtrack for the films of the Hunger Aqua teenager film for theater, believe it or not.
