SB: Maybe if I’d known that I was voicing Siri in advance, I might have had an idea in mind!įK: Do you refer to Siri as “it” or “she/her”? SB: I’d love to play a silly character…one with a quirky, cartoony voice!įK: Did you ever create an imagined visual of Siri as a “person”?
#SIRI VOICE ACTOR TV#
I used to do a lot of advertising work, providing all kinds of different voices for radio and TV commercials, but now, after Siri, I’ve been a bit typecast into doing a lot of announcer or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) voices.įK: What voice part would you love to have? I think back on the first recordings I did in 2005 that lasted four hours a day, five days a week, and need to take a nap!įK: Have you noticed commonalities/trends in your voice acting parts?
As for getting prepared for the sessions….As with any other voice job, I do some vocalizing, but for IVR work, which is really long and tedious…you have to prepare mentally. Everything has to be consistent for the concatenation process: technicians and computers go into the recordings, extract sounds, and reform these sounds into new phrases and sentences, which are what end up on our devices as Siri’s answers to our questions. SB: IVR recordings are not for the faint of heart!! They’re very tedious, because each phrase or sentence in the script has to be voiced exactly the same way…the same pitch, tone, pacing, attitude. If people are really interested in getting into VO, contact me through my website, and ask me for my VO Advice doc.įK: How did you prepare to voice Siri? What kind of headspace did you have to be in? Improv helps anybody do any kind of job, because it makes you think on your feet and immediately address a situation. The way to do that is to take classes, get a voice coach….I even suggest doing improv. SB: You have to be able to read cold, read quickly (so many :60 commercials are really :65 so you have to make it work!), and learn to act with your voice. in LA: What advice would you give to anyone who wants to get into voice acting? SB: Actually, I’m doing it! Thanks to Siri, I’ve begun a whole new career as a speaker, doing Siri presentations and speaker events all over the country….and even in Australia, and Croatia! And if anyone would like to book Siri, please contact my agent, Wes Stevens, at Vox, Inc. SB: I was fortunate that, because of my music, a lot of work just happened for me, so I kind of created myself as I went along!įK: What would you be doing if you weren’t a voice actor?
The voiceover work came later.įK: As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Susan Bennett: I was always musical, playing piano by ear at age 4, then singing both in high school and at Brown University. Photo courtesy of Susan BennettįK: Can you explain a bit about your background? Then, when Siri appeared in 2011, a fellow voice actor emailed me to say he was playing with the new iPhone app, and wasn’t that me? I went on the Apple site and listened, and, yup….it was me!! Susan in the studio. SB: When I did the recordings that became Siri, I thought I was just doing generic phone messaging. SB: I bet they did, but I don’t know what it was! To this day, I don’t know who or how I was voice was chosen for Siri, but I’m glad it was!!įK: Did they have a pseudonym for the project?
SB: You know, there really wasn’t an audition process. In the digital age, all of us voice actors are often auditioning without knowing it, because we’re featured on different agents’ and production companies’ websites. SB: Surprise… I never worked with Apple! I worked for an IVR company called Nuance, from which Apple got all of their Siri voices.įK: What was the audition process for that like? FK: How long before Siri came out were you working with Apple?
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