She’s been in the hands of over 100 million people. Perhaps she’s slept on your nightstand. She may have even drunk-dialed your ex.
And guess what: Susan Bennett, the original voice of Apple’s Siri, never saw it coming.
“A fellow voice actor emailed me and said ‘We’re playing around with this new iPhone, isn’t this you?’ So I went on the Apple site and listened and said ‘Oh my god, yes. Wow! How did this happen?'”
How do you become the most popular voice of the most successful tech company in the world–without your knowledge?
I interviewed Susan about her stumble into fame, then plotted her life against the rise of more human-like virtual assistants. It turns out that her voice appeared at two pivotal moments in the development of talking tech.
It makes you wonder, was Susan destined to become the world’s most recognizable digital voice?
“Back in the day when we used to have telephone operators, I would just play with this phone… Is it destiny that I became a voice on hundreds and hundreds of phone systems? I don’t know, maybe it was meant to be.”
Susan was born into an analog world, where transistor radios carried the tunes of Elvis and Chuck Berry, and dialing a zero on a phone meant tracing a large circle around a rotary dial.
“I was a musician, I was playing the piano by ear at the age of 4. So I knew that music was a huge part of my life. I never believed that I could actually make a living at it, though.”
But she did. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Susan toured as a backup singer for Burt Bacharach and Roy Orbison. She also sang jingles on radio and TV commercials.
Then one day, a voice actor didn’t show up at the recording studio. Susan got pulled in to substitute. And she was good.
Accident number 1: a voice acting career.
And off in a parallel universe, visionaries and engineers were starting to shape Susan’s digital future.
CommandLionInterface on April 15th, 2017 at 22:13 UTC »
Siri was a project of an independent company at this time. It was bought by Apple years after this.
toan55 on April 15th, 2017 at 19:53 UTC »
“I kind of got the best of both worlds because I was the original, and I do get to promote myself, and when Siri starts leading us all into the sea it won’t be my voice.”
Susan Bennett.
TooShiftyForYou on April 15th, 2017 at 19:45 UTC »
In June 2005, the software company ScanSoft was looking for someone to be the voice for a database project involving speech construction. ScanSoft inquired with GM Voices and selected Bennett, who happened to be present when the scheduled voice-over artist was absent. She worked in a home recording booth for the entire month of July 2005, more than four hours each day, reading phrases and sentences. The recordings were then concatenated into the various words, sentences, and paragraphs used in the Siri voice. Bennett only became aware she was the voice of Siri when a friend contacted her through email in October 2011.
Despite Apple not having acknowledged or confirmed its use of Bennett, audio-forensics experts hired by CNN expressed 100 percent certainty that Bennett is the voice of Siri.