UPDATED 11:43 EDT / NOVEMBER 11 2011

NEWS

Siri Gets a Face; Jon Briggs, the Voice of Siri Breaks the Silence

The man behind the male voice on the iPhone 4S Siri system in Britain has revealed himself. The man happens to be Jon Briggs, a former technology specialist. After the launch of the iPhone 4S, Jon Briggs noticed during a demonstration on television that the Cupertino company has used his voice on Siri.

Apple does not welcome that the British voice of its software Siri revealed himself on air. Apple asked him to remain quiet; he had received a call from Apple who asked him not to talk about his role in the design of the software. He was then called by a representative of Apple, who also requested that he not publicly talk about his work for Siri. Because Briggs had no direct contract with Apple, he decided to ignore this request. He then went on his own to give an interview on this subject in the Telegraph.

“I did a set of recordings with Scansoft five or six years ago, for text-to-speech services,” said Briggs. “Five thousand sentences over three weeks, spoken in a very particular way and only reading flat and even. Then they go away and take all the phonics apart, because I have to be able to read anything you want, even if I’ve never actually recorded all those words.”

The story begins six years ago. The company Scansoft, which subsequently merged with Nuance, recorded the voice of Jon Briggs and he was to deliver 5000 different sentences on several contracts. Recently, the Scansoft joined Nuance, who helped in the creation of Apple Siri.

Siri, the personal assistant in iPhone 4S, talk to users around the world from 14 October. You need to just ask the voice-activated mobile app just about anything, and Siri will give you a response. The new improved voice activated Siri AI is seen as opportunities for Apple to create advertising channels and also foray Apple into the lucrative search engine business where Google is currently dominating.

Siri was founded in 2007 by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Tom Gruber together with Norman Winarsky from SRI International‘s venture group.

Apple bought Siri in 2010 and not long after that acquisition, Siri teamed up with Wolfram Alpha to greatly improve results. Even as Siri rises in popularity, becoming the most notable improvement to the iPhone 4S, the person behind her stardom decided to take a backseat. It’s said that Kittlaus left Siri and Apple.


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