You may not recognize her face, but you know her sweet, robotic voice. She’s inside your phone and knows your calendar by heart. She boasts her encyclopedic knowledge all the time, but you don’t mind. She is Siri — aka Susan Bennett, the voice actress behind Apple’s witty digital assistant. Bennett has also loaned her voice to other familiar brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Cartoon Network, Waze and Delta Airlines.
But her most famous role is the smart, sassy Siri, one of the Fab Four of virtual assistants. With a unique vantage point, Bennett has watched little Siri grow up quickly alongside her chatty rivals — Cortana, Google Now and Alexa. “Instead of saying, ‘LOL,’ Siri now actually laughs,” says Bennett. But the more Siri sounds human, the more Bennett grows wary. Surprisingly, the original voice behind Siri has a few choice words for the unnerving future of AI. This interview has been condensed and edited.
HOW DID YOU BECOME THE VOICE BEHIND SIRI?
Bennett: It remains a bit of a mystery. In 2005, I had done some recordings for a liaison company that does a lot of voice messaging work — the whole month of July, four hours a day, five days a week. They had come up with these new scripts that were written rather differently than most messaging scripts. We were recording sound combinations that would sometimes be nonsensical. The other voice actors and I didn’t keep up with the speed of technology. We had absolutely no idea exactly what we were doing. So, five years later, Siri appears, and it’s like, “What? We’re who?”
"I THINK IT’S A SHAME THAT YOUNG PEOPLE MISS THE POINT OF WHERE THE ORIGINAL COMPUTER IS, WHICH IS BETWEEN OUR EARS."
