Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa might sound completely robotic, but their voices are trained from real people - even if these voice actors don't know it.
That's just the improbable situation that voice actress Susan Bennett found herself in.
Way back in 2005, Bennett - who was originally singing jingles for commercials - got a job recording lines for ScanSoft (now called Nuance), a company that worked on interactive voice responses.
The job was a pretty bizarre one, since she wasn't reading typical phrases like "Please call again" or "Turn left in 50 yards." Rather, she recently told Business Insider she was saying word combinations such as: "Cow hoist in the tug hut today."
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The idea, as it turns out, was to record her saying every combination of sounds that could be figured out in the English language.
As recounted to Business Insider, the job was weird, but it paid fine and Bennett forgot about it for a few years, until 2011, when Apple first launched Siri into the world for public use.
As Bennett tells it, she got an email from a fellow actor who wrote: "Hey, we’re playing around with this new iPhone - isn’t this you?"
From there it didn't take her long to find Apple's website and watch some clips of Siri in action to establish that it was, in fact, very much her voice being used.
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According to CNN, Apple hasn't confirmed that the original voice of Siri was indeed trained with Bennett's voice, but an audio expert with 30 years of experience has studied both voices and says he is “100%” certain they're the same.
It could be that ScanSoft was working for Apple as a subcontractor, so while Bennett got paid through the first company, she never knew that her voice might be going to the tech giant and that she wouldn't get any residuals or royalties from it.
The good news has been that this lack of clarity with Apple also meant that she wasn't locked behind an NDA or contract, so she's been free to use her status as the original voice of Siri to her benefit ever since.
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Along with speeches and more voice acting gigs, she's also met up with a few other Siri voice actors - after all, Siri now has multiple languages, accents and voice tones that you can choose from, each of them trained from a different voice.
It turns out that many of these actors have a similar story - they took a voice recording gig, read a whole load of weird lines, and only found out a good chunk of time later that they were now in the lineup voicing one of the world's most popular voice assistants.
The Siri we hear today is no longer trained from Bennett's voice - it's been updated plenty of times since - but she told Business Insider: "It's really been fun 'being' Siri. It's really given me a lot of really wonderful opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise, so no complaints here."
So, if you're in that line of work and you ever start reading what seems like nonsense off the page, you never know - before long your voice could be answering the queries of people all over the world.
Featured Image Credit: KR Productions /YouTube / Oli Scarff / Staff / Getty