“What can I help you with”, “some things you can ask me”, “sorry, I didn’t get that” such phrases when you hear from your iPhone, it’s the Siri speaking. No one ever thought that Siri could be a real person speaking, but here she is. Meet Susan Bennett, now 62. She is a voice over artist and singer from Atlanta in US.

In 2011, Susan got greatly surprised, when a new iPhone rolled in the market; she just got an email by her colleague asking if she was the voice behind Siri. The voice was pitched by apple’s vice president Phil Schiller as the cool feature of iPhone 4s. At that time Susan did not even had an iPhone, she just rushed to the apple website and checked Siri, and realized that it was her, talking to her.

When did it start?

This all started in 2005, as Bennett says, that she used to spend 4 hours a day and five days a week in month of July reading out random sentences and phrases like “Say the shrodding again, say the shroding again, say the shreeding again, say the shriding again, say the shrading again, say the shrudding again.” This was the time when she was building word bank with all kinds of possible variations that will later be helping Siri in building sentences.

She never knew that her recording with GM Voices, an Atlanta based voice recording company will become the sound of Siri. “Those involved in the recordings didn’t really know where these were going to end up. We were sort of vaguely told that it was going to be used for phone systems.” During the time, Siri was the most wanted voice in the country and Susan was behind the most wanted voice. But she never made a killing out of it. Till 2011-2013, Susan wasn’t getting compensated by Apple for using her voice; she was just paid by GM Voices for the recording.

Siri, she says with pride, was iconic. “It was the first concatenated voice (synthesized voice) that sounded human. The astounding thing behind this was the technology.” Though now there are many voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana — but nothing is like Siri.

“I was used to hearing my own voice on radio and in television commercials but when it came out of the phone, it was creepy. The voice was manipulated in some way. My husband is a guitarist and an audio engineer. We were putting together a demo of me talking to Siri and he had to try a lot of compression to make my voice sound like Siri’s.” 

Susan later met apple cofounder Steve Wozniak at a conference and Steve told her that how much he appreciates Siri. She used to go on for conferences and presentations with Wozniak, but later it stopped. Eventually she did her public speaking gig in her first TED talk in 2016 where she told her audience about how recordings are done. She even told about how much freaked she got, how she handled it and how it affected her.

This also happened

Once a Norwegian girl named Siri reached to Bennett and told her “I don’t like the fact that it has my name.” Susan replied “well, sometimes I don’t like the fact that it has my voice either.” But she added quickly that Siri has been a positive change in her life. Though sometimes people call her Siri instead of Susan, but she talks like Siri and says “OK, now I’ll have to tell you where to go.”

Apple has not yet confirmed that Bennett is the original voice behind Siri and if you ask Siri about “who is the original voice of Siri” she would as usual give you all the warm answers and will take you to a bunch of links. One of the links has Susan Bennett, a women in suburban Atlanta, whose voice answers your every question.