SALT LAKE CITY — Voice-over actor Susan Bennett had pretty much forgotten about a mysterious recording session she’d done in the mid-2000s when some friends emailed her in 2011 with a surprise question.
Those friends had just gotten ahold of Apple’s just-released iPhone 4S, which featured a novel new feature — the digital voice assistant known as Siri. And, they thought the voice of the new virtual helper sounded awfully familiar.
“As soon as I heard it, I knew it was me,” Bennett said.
Bennett is in Salt Lake City this week as a featured speaker at the inaugural NEXT customer conference for Utah sales engagement software company Xant (formerly InsideSales).
Bennett said the recordings she did for a company called Nuance in 2005 came together by sheer coincidence when another actor canceled and she filled in at the last minute. She said she believed she was doing work that would likely get used for some kind of automated phone system, but noted the session itself was a bit unusual.
“I spent over a month, working four hours a day reading a lot of nonsense sentences and phrases,” Bennett said. “We didn’t know that we were recording stuff for characters, didn’t know we would become these virtual assistants, which wasn’t on anyone’s mind at the time. I thought it was generic stuff for someone’s phone system.”
As it turns out, all of that audio recording was aimed at capturing every possible combination of sounds that could later be broken into individual parts so they could be selectively put back together, a process called concatenation, to make the original Siri say, well, whatever “she” needed to say.
Bennett, now 70, got her start as a singer in high school and would continue to be interested in music as a student at Brown University. Bennett dipped her toes into the big time with backup singing gigs in the ’60s and ’70s with stars like Burt Bacharach and Roy Orbison, but later moved into the voice-over world, singing jingles for radio and TV ads. And, she still performs with two bands she’s in with her husband, playing ’60s rock-and-roll.
All that talent was put on the backburner, however, when Bennett recorded the sounds that would later become Siri.
“We were instructed to be very monotone throughout the recordings,” Bennett said. “Going into the recordings it had to be very consistent — same sound, same pitch, same tone.”
Bennett noted her version of Siri, which was in place until Apple released its iOS7 system in 2013, now sounds a little dated thanks to ongoing advancements in technology.
“The original voice sounded a lot more robotic than the new voice,” Bennett said. “Obviously, the technology is improved dramatically since then.”
While Apple has never publicly acknowledged Bennett as the voice behind the original Siri, and the company did not respond to Deseret News emails seeking confirmation or comment, an audio forensics expert hired by CNN in 2013 said the voice “100%” belongs to Bennett.
And, though Bennett was not required to sign a non-disclosure agreement when she did the recordings, and was only compensated for the time she worked doing the recordings, she said the gig has evolved into a sort of second career.
“The whole experience has been very positive,” Bennett said. “It’s turned into a whole new career for me. I do speaking engagements ... and people are fascinated to hear more about the voice behind Siri.”
While voice assistants have become ubiquitous in recent years, thanks in large part to the proliferation of “smart” speaker innovations from Apple, Amazon, Google and others, Apple’s release of Siri on the iPhone 4S in 2011 was the debut of the artificial intelligence-driven natural voice recognition technology in a pairing with a smartphone.