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Meet the woman behind Siri's voice

Meet the woman behind Siri's voice

By Anupam Saxena | Updated: 4 October 2013 18:26 IST

The human voice behind Apple's intelligent voice-based personal assistant, Siri, has come forward to reveal her identity.

Susan Bennett, who lives in Atlanta (US) has revealed that her voice was used for Siri. In an interview with CNN, Bennett explained that she was not sure about her legal position or if she wanted the notoriety, so she refrained from disclosing her identity. However, following a recent video story by the Verge about synthesised speech managed, which to spread the misinformation that Allison Dufty was Siri's voice, Bennett decided to come forward.

According to Bennett, the voice of Siri was recorded in 2005 by GM Voices, an Atlanta based company that recorded voices for automated voice technologies, for software company ScanSoft. Bennett signed a contract in June 2005, offering her voice for a database to construct speech. The recordings took place in July 2005 in her home recording booth.

In October 2005, ScanSoft acquired Nuance Communications, and then renamed itself as Nuance - the company which built the technology that powers Siri.

The CNN article also shed some light on the process of synthesising voices. It mentions that voice experts pull out vowels, consonants, syllables and diphthongs, and play with pitch and speed after voice artists record their voice.
Voice snippets are then synthesised through concatenation, thereby building words, sentences, paragraphs.

CNN claims it has independently verified Bennett's claim by hiring an audio forensics expert, Ed Primeau, to compare Bennett's voice with Siri, and he confirmed that the two voices match. Apple did not comment on the matter. Nuance also declined to comment.

Siri, which is Apple's voice-based personal assistant, was introduced two years ago with the launch of the iPhone 4S, on October 4, 2011.

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