Original voice of Siri explains why she's been paid a total of $0 by Apple

The original voice behind Siri has revealed that she was never actually hired or paid by Apple, despite becoming one of the most recognizable voices in tech history.

Voice actor Susan Bennett spoke to Supercar Blondie about the bizarre way her voice ended up inside millions of iPhones around the world, admitting she still has ‘no idea how or why’ it was chosen.

What makes the story even stranger is that Bennett says she didn’t even know Apple was using her recordings until after Siri launched.

We can’t imagine how weird it was to realize her own voice was talking back to her from her iPhone.

Months of strange recordings

Before Siri became a household name in tech, Susan Bennett had been hired for what she believed were ‘generic’ voice recordings for another company she’d worked with for years.

Rather than recording full conversations, she spent months reading out endless random phrases, sentences, and sounds that could later be chopped up and rebuilt into new speech.

“It was a complete surprise,” Bennett told Supercar Blondie.

“Which means I was never hired nor paid by Apple.”

The work itself sounds incredibly repetitive, and Bennett said she originally recorded for four hours a day, but eventually had to reduce it to two because the sessions became too exhausting.

For around four months, she sat in a recording booth reading bizarre nonsensical phrases designed to capture every possible sound in the English language.

The goal was to create a giant library of syllables that engineers could later stitch together into completely new words and responses.

“It must’ve been an incredibly tedious process,” she explained: “Someone had to go into the phrases and sentences and extract words and syllables from the recordings to form new words and phrases.”

At the time, Bennett says nobody really understood how advanced voice technology would become, and she admitted signing away the recordings felt fairly harmless back then.

“Of course, it was a rather naive thing that I did,” she said.

Talking to her phone and hearing her own voice felt ‘a little weird’

Once Siri officially launched on the iPhone 4S in 2011, friends started recognizing Bennett’s voice almost immediately.

At first, she kept quiet about it because she was worried about potential legal complications.

Eventually though, the similarities became impossible to deny and Bennett admitted the experience of hearing herself inside a phone was surreal.

“I guess it was a little weird to talk to Siri and hear myself respond,” she said.

Despite being the original voice behind one of tech’s most iconic assistants, Bennett says she rarely even uses Siri herself.

Apple has also updated and changed Siri’s voice multiple times since the original recordings were used, meaning millions of newer users probably have no idea where the assistant’s voice first came from.

Still, Susan Bennett’s accidental role in tech history remains one of the strangest behind-the-scenes stories from the early Apple era.