Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate that the countless electronic voices we hear, from the prompt at the self-checkout to the disembodied tone coming from our phones, were provided by a real person. Where do those voices come from? To find out, [Phil Edwards] asked the original voice of the iPhone assistant Siri.
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.
She’s invested seriously in her studio because a majority of her recording occurs at home, typical of many voice actors. It’s built on rubber feet to absorb sound, and she uses it every day. There’s foam on the wall, a desk with a pre-amp and mixer, and a Neumann TLM 193 microphone (average price: $1,599). Sitting on an adjustable stool, she reads her scripts off an iPad and has a computer monitor to see how recording is going.
Thanks to worldwide high-quality connections — begun with high-quality ISDN lines and extending to today’s fiber-optic broadband — it’s possible for actors around the world to record from home and compete with one another.
Read the full article at vox.com.