The studio owner asked Bennett to fill in, “because I didn’t have an accent,” she remembers. Or, she says, they add or find a rhythm to make a character sound natural and authentic.Įven though Apple stopped using Bennett’s voice in 2013, her unique rhythm and sound remains an iconic feature – not just of early iPhones, but of the broader quest to create meaningful conversation between human and machine.Bennett calls her path to a voice-over career a “happy accident.” She was working as a musician performing backup vocals on a studio project when a hired narrator didn’t show. “I think a lot of really, really successful and good voice actors can feel a rhythm to what they're reading,” Bennett says. She says it was an extension of singing – for her, she says, it’s about rhythm.
People getting into voiceovers need to have a voice coach because it's really a part of acting, and that's why you'll find a lot of musicians and actors doing a lot of voiceover work.”įor Susan Bennett, voiceover work came very naturally. “It's not enough just to have an interesting voice or a quirky voice or some sort of distinctive voice. Having a voice coach, Bennett says, is also key. You also have to be able to read fast sometimes, because they like to put a lot more copy into 60 seconds than you would think,” Bennett says. “You have to be able to read well and you have to be able to read within a certain amount of time. And it really turned into something fun rather than something I wasn't used to doing or particularly comfortable doing.”īennett will tell you having certain skills are needed to be a voice actor. And so it made that sort of transition easier for me. People already love Siri, and so I can just be Siri or a Siri representative. “When I go out and do speaker events and tech conferences, I don't have to win anybody over. Her solution, she says, is to embrace her “Siri voice.” “And so, I thought, ‘Oh, do I want to be this person that's on everybody's device all over the world?’ And I thought, ‘Well you don't really have a choice.’ I had to accept and figure out a way to spin it to the positive for myself, which I've done.” I am a very private person,” Bennett says. “Siri has been a huge and very positive life lesson for me because I had to face certain insecurities and certain fears. How did Bennett feel about being the voice of Siri? That is also how voices like Bennett’s find their way into digital devices like GPS and telephone systems. “They go in and take sounds, form them back together into new phrases and sentences.”Īnd that is how Siri was developed – based on recording sessions Bennett did. “It’s a process called concatenation,” Bennett says. The sentences were created solely to get every sound combination possible in the language,” Bennett says.īecause they were created for sound and not content, Bennett says sometimes the sentences could be very strange – for example, “cow hoist in the tub today” or “fasa ask fasa ask fuzzy.”Īfter the recordings were done, the programmers went in and extracted vowels, consonants, syllables and diphthongs, as well as played with her pitch and speed. “For four hours every day, I would read nonsensical phrases and sentences that were created by programmers. In 2005, she was simply making recordings for a text-to-speech company. In fact, she had no idea her voice would be used. Apple did not hire her, and Bennett did not audition for the role. From that moment, she was on a new career path.īut still, Bennett did not expect to find her way onto your phone. One of the voice actors didn’t show up at the recording studio to read the copy.
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“I started singing jingles and doing studio work, singing backup vocals, and singing commercials and leads for, you know, radio and TV commercials,” Bennett says. Getting into voiceover work, Bennett says, was kind of accidental.