The original voice of Siri explains the art of the voiceover. Susan Bennett is a voice actor who started working in the industry in the 1970s, singing the Tillie the All Time Teller jingle, one of the first ATMs. Since then she has recorded narration for PA systems, answering services and commercials, until she finally landed Siri in 2005. It was hard work, according to Vox.
Talking to Susan Bennett is surreal — at one moment she sounds completely normal, except she has the most pleasant voice you’ve ever heard. But in a flash she can turn on the Siri voice, and you start thinking you’re talking to your computer. […] When Bennett recorded the voice for Siri in 2005, she had no idea it would end up on the iPhone. She recorded it well before the company that built Siri was bought by Apple, and she didn’t even know she was the voice of Siri until the product debuted in the App Store in 2010 and then appeared on the iPhone 4S in 2011. But as seamless as Bennett sounds as Siri, it was a surprisingly difficult project to capture her voice.
“I recorded four hours a day, five days a week for the month of July,” Bennett says. For a voice actor, that workload causes a lot of strain. “That’s a long time to be talking constantly. Consequently, you get tired.”