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."
"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."
No comments:
Post a Comment