The iOS virtual assistant Siri debuted in 2011 after the introduction of the iPhone 4S. The critics praised this new system little used until then in which it was possible to interact with a virtual assistant obtaining information and interaction. Little by little and update after update, innovation and the development of new technologies have made Siri is getting smarter, although there are still many furrows to dig. The person who gave voice to the original iOS voice assistant, Susan Bennett, has been interviewed and has provided more information on how the process went and how he did not find out until the official launch that his voice was that of Siri.
A little history around Siri: Nuance and ScanSoft
It was all born with a project started in July 2005 by a company called ScanSoft, in charge of services related to text-to-speech conversion. Susan Bennett was involved in this project and was made to understand that the objective of the project was a new messaging system.
What she did not know, nor did the executives around her, was that this project would be the basis for developing Siri. Months later, ScanSoft merged with its competitor Nuance. This merger was in charge of granting the virtual assistant of the voice recognition ability and voices. It was in 2013 when he released all the details of the work done with ScanSoft. These statements prompted the Big Apple to remove Bennett's voice and incorporate another redesigned voice after the release of iOS 7.
Susan Bennett conducted a tortuous and exhausting work based on reciting nonsense phrases one after another to monitor each of the phonemes, words and intonations; so she told it in a new interview in the middle Typeform:
We were recording for a text-to-speech company. And that was new to us. We had no idea what we were doing. We thought we were making new scripts for phone systems.
In other interviews with Bennett, she highlighted "Creepy" which was heard in the voice of Siri after its launch in October 2011. Imagine the situation: a job done years ago appears materialized in a virtual assistant of one of the most advanced technology companies on the market.