Jon Briggs didn't even know he was the voice of Apple's Siri until he saw an iPhone 4S commercial in the UK the other day.
After recognizing his own voice, Briggs realized Apple wanted to keep the whole thing a secret.
In 2005, Briggs had done some voice recording work for text-to-speech company Scansoft, where he recorded more than 5,000 sentences, according to Business Insider.
Nuance, the company Apple uses for Siri's voice recognition technology, eventually bought Scansoft. And that's how Briggs' voice ended up being Siri's voice in the UK, also known as "Daniel."
Apparently, Apple didn't want anyone to find out about Briggs. The Cupertino-based company even asked him to keep his mouth shut, the Telegraph reports.
“We’re not about one person,” Apple told Briggs.
But Briggs reminded Apple he had never signed a contract, and decided to reveal himself.
Briggs is a tech journalist who has also done work for the BBC, Radio2, Garmin and TomTom. He didn't actually record all of the words in Siri's lexicon. Instead, Nuance chopped up all those sentences he recorded into smaller phonics, then put them together to create new words.
The person behind the female voice of Siri in the US is still a mystery. Looking at Briggs' experience, perhaps she doesn't even know about it yet.
The video below features Briggs on "The Weakest Link," a quiz show on the BBC. Recognize his voice?:
