“Siri became a persona,” Susan told me, “but Apple wanted the voice to be anonymous – they wanted people to create their own character. “When I first found out that was my voice,” she said, “to be honest it was a little creepy.” On October 4th, 2011, the iPhone 4S changed smartphone technology forever, and Siri was introduced to millions of users. “It’s very taxing to read something that doesn’t have a break in tone,” she said. “Each phrase had to be read with no emotion,” she told me, “but not in a monotone.” Needless to say, it was as tedious as it was challenging and exhausting. She had no way of knowing that Siri’s technology and her voice would ultimately be sold to Apple, becoming the ubiquitous voice on smartphones around the world. The job was for a company called Nuance, the IVR company that powered Siri. She took on the grueling job of recording scripts over a period of four weeks, four hours a day, five days a week. But there was science behind the nonsensical sentence structures they contained words that could be reformed into other sentences, in every possible sound combination. “It contained words that were strung together in nonsense sentences, such as ‘cow hoist in the tub hut today,’” Susan told me. The script for a IVR voice recording is relatively simple – a number of commands and responses are recorded so they can be arranged through a decision tree to drive customer service interactions. The script was unlike anything she’d seen before. In 2005, she was doing a lot of work for phone messaging recordings when a new set of scripts showed up for an IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) technology company. Susan is an accomplished professional voice artist who greets passengers at Delta gates worldwide, and has given voice to a long list of brands including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the Discovery Channel. The woman who was the original voice of Siri is my high school classmate and friend Susan Bennett. And if you want a sample of Siri’s wry sense of humor, ask her “what does Siri mean?” Here’s one of several mind-boggling answers you’ll receive: “It’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma, tied with a pretty ribbon of obfuscation.” Perhaps it’s telling that Siri also means “secret” in Swahili maybe Steve Jobs had a sense of humor after all. One of its inventors, a Norwegian named Dag Kittlaus, once considered Siri as a name for his daughter – hence the original name of the technology – but the acronym soon followed as a more officious moniker was deemed necessary. If you require a more intimate relationship with the voice on your phone, take comfort that Siri also means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian. But SIRI is in fact an acronym for Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface. We usually see Siri spelled in caps and lower case, as if she’s a real person with a very weird name, instead of an application on your phone. By Robert Palmer, chief innovation officer, HCB Health
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