Although Apple won’t confirm it, CNN has found Siri. It turns out she’s a middle-aged voiceover actor from Atlanta named Susan Bennett.
Bennett decided to reveal her identity after a technology blog posted a story that suggested the voice of Siri was a different woman. When the subject of the blog’s story, Allison Dufty, denied it, Bennett felt that it was time to come forward.
Since Apple won’t confirm her identity, CNN brought on an audio forensics expert to investigate her claims and concluded that Bennett’s voice is a “100 percent match.”
Here’s an excerpt from CNN’s Jessica Ravitz’s story:
Bennett was a voiceover artist I was interviewing for a CNN special project on the world’s busiest airport—Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International—scheduled to come out next month. I was tracking down the airport’s voices, and she, a voice of Delta terminals, was one of them. In the course of our phone conversation, I asked her to rattle off some jobs she’s had over the years. She gave me a quick and general rundown and then added that she’s done a lot of IVR work.
“IVR?” I asked.
“Interactive voice response,” she answered. “The sort of thing you hear on a company’s phone system.”
For reasons I can’t explain — I was still struggling to understand my first iPhone — I blurted out, “Hey, are you Siri?”
She gasped. And then I gasped.
“Oh my God,” I said. “You’re totally Siri, aren’t you?”
Watch the CNN piece about Susan Bennett below.
Leave a Reply