“Militia Oy Hallucinate Buckram Okra Ooze”… “Cow hoist in the tub hut today”… “Cathexis fefatelly sexual ease stump”… Sorry to butt in, but can you give us some examples? It was 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, of reading pages and pages of these nonsensical things. In July of 2005, I was hired by ScanSoft, the biggest IVR company in the world, to do some recordings. Promotional materials for Tillie the All-Time Teller (via the Wells Fargo History Museum in Los Angeles) They’d take my recordings and chop them up into syllables and sounds, then a computer could combine them into phrases and sentences. I had to pronounce things incredibly articulately. I had to wear this little belt over my vocal cords - a laryngograph - to measure the wavelengths of my speech for consistency. They handed me a paper and asked me to read this absolute nonsense. In the early 2000s, I was working for a telecommunications company called Lucent Technologies, recording Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. But flash forward a few decades, and computers began to change everything. In these days, actors would simply record entire pre-written paragraphs or sentences. It became the first successful ATM machine in the United States. They called her ‘ Tillie the All-Time Teller ,’ and they hired me to sing a jingle in her voice. So, they decided to personalize the machine by putting a little face of a smiling girl on it. That’s right! In the early ‘70s, The First National Bank of Atlanta started introducing some of the earliest ATM machines - but nobody would use them! People didn’t trust computers yet. You were also the ‘voice’ of one of the first-ever ATM machines, right? I am the voice you hear over the loudspeaker at Delta Airlines gates, and also on a bunch of GPS and phone systems. I did jingle and voice-over work for hundreds of companies - Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Macy’s, Goodyear, Papa John’s, IBM. Susan Bennett, then and now (via Susan Bennett) The studio owner said, “Susan, you don’t have an accent come over the read this copy.” I thought, ‘ Ding, ding, ding! I can do this! ’ The job went well and I decided to get a voice acting coach and an agent. One day, I had just finished recording a jingle for a product and for whatever reason, the voice actor for the ad didn’t show up to read the copy. I started spending a lot of time in studios recording backup vocals and singing jingles. Through that, got some interesting opportunities. In the early ‘70s, I graduated from Brown, ended up in Atlanta, and started singing in clubs. Growing up, I had no concept that you could actually make a living with your voice. ZC: To start off, how’d you get into voice acting? The transcript below has been lightly edited for brevity. We recently sat down with Bennett to learn a bit more about her life and experiences as the original voice of Siri. Today, voice assistants like Siri, Cortanta, and Alexa are becoming more ubiquitous - but we rarely get a chance to meet the people behind those voices. Little did she know that 6 years later, her voice would be in the hands of millions of people all around the world, immortalized as the most recognizable virtual timbre in the history of mobile phones: Siri.
She was not told what the recordings would be used for.
When the work was done, Bennett collected her hourly rate and moved on to the next gig. Stuff like, “ Say the zzzzzzz ding again. For an entire month - 4 hours per day, 5 days per week - she sat in a studio reading sentences that seemed to make no sense.
In July of 2005, an accomplished voice actor named Susan Bennett was hired to record a bunch of material.