Siri might frustrate you less once you meet the woman who voiced it.
On Friday, CNN revealed that voice actor Susan Bennett is the voice behind Siri, Apple's personal assistant on iPhones and iPads.
"I'm the actor who provided the voice for Siri," she told CNN.
Bennett said she didn't know she voiced Siri until Apple integrated it into the iPhone in 2011. "A colleague e-mailed me [about Siri] and said, 'Hey, we've been playing around with this new Apple phone. Isn't this you?'" she said. Once Bennett heard Siri's voice, she knew it was.
Bennett is an accomplished voice actor, and has done work for companies like AT&T, Delta, Coca Cola, McDonalds and more. When Bennett signed the contract for the job in 2005, she didn't know what the recordings would be used for. But the gig had her working four hours a day for a month recording the phrases that would be baked into iOS.
However, Apple, being the secretive company that it is, wouldn't confirm Bennett was behind the robot assistant.
To make its case, CNN got the professional opinion of an audio forensics expert, and had him analyze Bennett's voice against Siri's. The expert, Ed Primeau, studied the two voices and said, "They are identical -- a 100% match." The CEO of the voiceover company Bennet worked confirm she is Siri as well.
If Siri sounds sassy, it might be because Bennett got bored at the end of these sessions, she said.
There has been a lot of speculation about who was behind the now famous voice. Just last month, The Verge posted a video about Siri that caused some to incorrectly believe that Siri was played by a woman named Allison Duffy. Duffy was forced to write a blog post saying that she was not Siri.
Though Siri is now a feature of Apple phones, it was originally created by a company of the same name. As the Huffington Post previously reported, Apple overhauled Siri when it purchased it, arguably for the worse by stripping it of its attitude and many of its best features.
For example, when asked restaurant suggestions, the original Siri would search multiple sites like Yelp, AllMenus and Google Maps for results. Today's Siri isn't nearly that advanced.
With iOS 7, Apple's latest operating system, Apple introduced a male voice option for U.S. customers. In some countries, like France and the UK, Siri was introduced with a male voice.
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