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Monday, September 4, 2017

I'm The Voice Of Siri, And Apple Didn't Pay (Or Warn) Me

You'd think the voice of Siri would be rolling in dough after lending her voice to the app, especially considering it's one of the most popular smartphone apps ever and Siri is now BFFs with The Rock.But as Susan Bennett, aka the voice of Siri, will tell you voice over jobs don't gain you much recognition or money, and even though hers is one of the most famous voices in the world she wishes she'd never lent her voice to Siri.
Here's the kicker- she didn't actually agree to be Siri, and nobody told her those excruciatingly long and painfully boring recording sessions were created to give Siri a voice, because the recordings were sold to Apple by a text-to-speech company:
Siri was developed based on recording sessions Susan did with another company. Susan had done a lot of interactive voice response work (the voice on the phone that tells you to press 1 for English) and thought she was just doing more. "The recordings were done for a text-to-speech company starting in 2005. Apple got all their Siri voices from this company, but they came in after the fact. We had no contracts with Apple."
Selling her voice in this way meant Susan had no say in the usage, and guaranteed she didn't see a dime of the millions made by Apple thanks to Siri's presence on iPhones, which seems like shady practice from a company who could buy the moon:
"I had really ambivalent feelings. I was flattered to be chosen to basically be the voice of Apple in North America, but having been chosen without my knowledge was strange. Especially since my voice was on millions and millions of devices."
"There were Siris all over the world because, for instance, I don't speak Thai or Japanese. They had to have native speakers. And all of the original Siris weren't paid for the usage. We were paid for the original recording sessions, but we weren't paid for being on all those phones. Which is a pretty big issue for us. I know there was one person who ended up getting fired from another job because he was working for a company that considered Apple a competitor. His voice was on the iPhone, and he lost a job because of it."

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