Siri's first voices were recorded years before anyone knew they would talk back
In July 2005 voice actor Susan Bennett spent sessions reading odd phrases for a speech company, with no idea what they were for. Six years later her voice was answering questions on millions of iPhones. Siri itself began as a spin-off from a military-funded research project at SRI International.
The assistant grew out of the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International and was an offshoot of CALO, a project funded by the US defence research agency DARPA. Dag Kittlaus, Tom Gruber and Adam Cheyer co-founded the company. Kittlaus borrowed the name from a Norwegian co-worker; it is a short form of Sigrid, from Old Norse words meaning victory and beautiful. Its early prototype ran on a platform built jointly with a lab at the Swiss institute EPFL.
Speech recognition came from Nuance Communications, though neither Apple nor Nuance admitted this until Nuance's chief executive Paul Ricci confirmed it at a 2013 conference. Siri appeared as a standalone iOS app in December 2010, Apple bought it in April 2011 under Steve Jobs, and it launched built into the iPhone 4s on October 14, 2011. Jobs died the following day.
The voices had quiet origins. Bennett revealed herself as the American voice in October 2013, and an audio forensics expert backed her claim, though Apple never confirmed it. The British male voice belonged to Jon Briggs, longtime narrator of The Weakest Link, who learned of his role from television. Australia's version came from Karen Jacobsen, already known there as the GPS girl. The recordings had been made for Scansoft, later absorbed by Nuance, and Apple simply licensed them. A voice called Quinn, neither male nor female, joined the choices in February 2022.
Early reviews praised the recognition but criticised rigid commands and trouble with some English accents. Large language model features, including ChatGPT integration, arrived in 2024, and Apple unveiled a rebuilt Siri AI, developed with Google Gemini, on June 8, 2026.
Source: Siri
