Here’s a voice that may sound eerily familiar. Susan Bennett is a voiceover artist who did a series of recordings in 2005 for Apple. Later, she was surprised to hear her voice used for Siri, iPhone’s ‘intelligent assistant’.
She told CNN that it took a month of daily four-hour sessions to capture all the possible vocalisations required to give Siri a library of sounds that can be concatenated together to construct its utterances.
Stiching those sounds together seamlessly, achieving a natural tone and cadence, is part of the magic of Siri, and other systems such as Cortana. But as Susan points out, that natural-sounding delivery is something that has only very recently been achieved.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/z2bTymnb1uE[/youtube]
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