Susan Bennett

Hi, this is Susan Bennett, the real Siri.

Susan Bennett

I am ready to launch.

Susan Bennett

It’s changed a lot actually. I do a lot of different work that I used to do after embracing that I’m the real Siri and I do a lot of speaking events and appearances because people are fascinated by Siri. They’re also fascinated by the fact that there’s an actual human behind the voice. I think everyone thought the voice was computer generated.

People enjoy learning about the real Siri because it really is an iconic thing. The first concatenated voice to sound human voice.

Susan Bennett

Well, I struggled with it. For 2 years, I didn’t reveal myself as the real Siri. Siri appeared on October 4, 2011 and I didn’t appear as the real Siri until October 4, 2013 because I knew that it was going to be a significant factor in my career.

Another interesting fact is that most people don’t know there were a lot of original Siri voices worldwide because even though the voice is concatenated. If you don’t know what that means, it means after recordings are done, technicians and computers go and extract sounds. Then, reform this sounds together in new phrases and sentences and those are what end up on the devices.

I didn’t read every possible Siri response or every possible street in The United States or anything like that. This phrases and sentences were all created from the recordings and the original concatenated voices is sounded very robotic and you couldn’t interact with them. They said it like, “Hello, how are you,” and you certainly didn’t want to talk to those voices and that’s what made the original Siri so iconic.

Susan Bennett

All of the original Siri voices, many of us have done a lot of messaging work and work that you, as a voice talent consider anonymous, and what changed for all of us is when all of a sudden, our anonymity was completely gone when our anonymous voice became a persona like Siri.

If you’re calling up and you hear my voice go, “Thank you for calling. Please press 1.” You’re not going to say, “Oh, that voice sounds so familiar.” You’re not even going to listen to the sound of my voice because you’re listening for the information. However, as soon as that voice becomes a persona in your phone that you talk to, suddenly, the voice actor is no longer anonymous.

I had to really struggle with what I wanted to do with that information.

Susan Bennett

Well, I think it says a lot.

The voice says about who we are. It has to do with just the basic sound of our voices. It has an influence on people. How we speak whether we have an accent or not, people can identify where we’re from.

Also, people can generally tell even if you’re trying to hide. People can tell if you’re angry or if you’re really excited. It just automatically comes through the voice and what is going to be a significant factor in our so called progress towards artificial intelligence is the voice.

Susan Bennett

At least the sound that became the AI’s voice was originally human voice.

Susan Bennett

Well, I became the real Siri accidentally because I’m a musician. I’m a singer and I used to sing a lot of jingles for commercials when they did that. Now, they don’t do it as so much. In the 70’s and 80’s, we used to do tons and tons of jingles.

One day, I was at one of the bigger studios here at Atlanta and the voice talent didn’t show up to read the copy of the spot. The owner of the studio said, “Susan, you don’t have an accent. Come over here and read this copy.” I was able to do it very easily and I just, “Ding ding ding! I can do this.” So, I got a voice coach and then a voice talent agent and I’ve been doing voice ever since.

Susan Bennett

I think one of the most interesting things you can do as far as having any kind of influence on how your voice sounds is to record yourself.

Many times, we don’t realize exactly how we’re sounding to another person especially if you’re in a stressful situation.

When you’re stressed or you’re angry about something and you’re trying to be as politically correct and trying to be as kind as possible but there’s that little edge that might be coming through, and a lot of times, from the inside, we don’t really hear it.

When you hear your recording, you will “Oh, is that what I sounded like?” It’s an interesting phenomenon that I think it really does express who we are, what we’re going through at that moment.

Susan Bennett

I think one of the most interesting things you can do as far as having any kind of influence on how your voice sounds is to record yourself.

Many times, we don’t realize exactly how we’re sounding to another person especially if you’re in a stressful situation.

When you’re stressed or you’re angry about something and you’re trying to be as politically correct and trying to be as kind as possible but there’s that little edge that might be coming through, and a lot of times, from the inside, we don’t really hear it.

When you hear your recording, you will “Oh, is that what I sounded like?” It’s an interesting phenomenon that I think it really does express who we are, what we’re going through at that moment.

Susan Bennett

Well, I’ve had some cartoons but that’s a pretty close job. That’s a hard thing to break into. Incredibly talented people amongst in Los Angeles pretty much have that gig wrapped up and of course, they use a lot of celebrities to do cartoon voices and such.

One of the things that I love about the human voice over businesses is every job is so completely different. It’s a vast and interesting thing but as far as where the human voice comes from, if you can learn to support your voice from the diaphragm, you will find all sorts of tricks that you can do. You can go without taking a breath longer than you think if you know how to push through with you diaphragm. There’s a lot to study about it. I’m certainly no expert in that field.

There’s a lot to learn about. There are a lot of skills that you really can learn and need to learn. So many people now that voice overs become kind of a thing, no one knew what it was for years and now, in the last 5 years, it just becomes this thing and everyone wants to be a voice talent and considering the fact that our culture has gone from like, “Whatever” to “It’s all good.” We’re not so much caring about professionalism and experience anymore.

Basically, if you’ve got a corky human voice and you can read well enough, you can land some big commercial. So, everybody wants to do that. Everyone is trying to get into business. The result being that so many people are doing auditions that I personally know that the client cannot listen to all of them.

I call it, “The Voice Over Wild West” because it’s become kind of crap shit, really, because there are so many people competing at this point in time.

Susan Bennett

I was doing a lot of messaging for a company that I still work for actually. Doing messaging and that sort of thing isn’t what you would call the bling of the human voice for my business but it’s a very steady work. I love the people that I work with and so, I continue to do it.

Back in 2005, when I did the original work, became the vocabulary for the original Siri. I thought I was doing more messaging and I’ve been in touched with a lot of other original Siri voices that did the same thing.

We did not know where our voices were going to end up. We did not know that Apple was going to get involved. We did not know that our voices would end up being on millions and millions of devices. We fell into the technological crack. This kind of chasm between business as usual and business as it has changed with the speed of technology.

During that time between when I did the recordings in 2005 and when Siri appeared in 2011, a lot happened.

We didn’t really know what we were doing when we did those recordings. I personally thought they were very interesting. They ultimately became incredibly tedious because it requires hours and hours of reading phrases and sentences in the same pitch, the same tone, the same pace. It’s very hard work.

Susan Bennett

I used to love it when we would go into the studio with other human voice talent and work because most of these people come from either acting or music background or radio. Something where it involves acting and it would be a lot of fun to interact with these people and many times, we come up with stuff that was improvised that wasn’t even in the script that ended up in the spot.

I really love interacting with other people and doing that sort of work, but now that everyone has his or her own booth, for the most past, we just record our little parts and the engineer puts it all together. That used to be my favorite thing was doing dialog.

To tell you the truth, I just love to work. So, I’m actually very grateful for and have fun with just about every job. However, I will have to say, I don’t do any text to speak to her or just the stuff that became Siri.

Susan Bennett

This stage in real life is like, “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

Susan Bennett

I use the iPhone and one of the reasons that I was excited about having been chosen as the real Siri was that we are a completely Apple household. We love Apple products so that was kind of cool.

I do not use Siri because it was just too creepy hearing my voice. I was used to hearing my voice on radio, TV commercials, and things like that. I always laugh and say, “Well, I don’t do it because I talk to myself.”

Susan Bennett

Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.