In April 2017, I had a truly surreal “buttoned-up” conversation with Susan Bennett—the original voice of Apple’s Siri. While millions of people around the world talk to her every day, few actually know the human behind the digital assistant. During our session on Scoop B Radio, we touched on the fame, the anonymity, and a specific viral “Easter egg” that had everyone scratching their heads: Why won’t Siri give a straight answer to “What is zero divided by zero?”
Reflecting on this in 2025—as AI assistants have evolved into complex, conversational entities like Gemini and GPT—Susan’s 2017 playful defiance serves as a reminder of the “human” personality that was programmed into our technology from the very beginning.
“I Can, I Just Won’t”: The Siri Philosophy
At the time, asking Siri to divide zero by zero resulted in a famously sassy response involving “Cookie Monster” and “having no friends.” When I pressed Susan on why she couldn’t just give the mathematical answer, her response was classic Siri.
“I can, I just won’t,” Susan Bennett told me with a laugh. “Siri has a bit of an attitude, you know? She’s not just a calculator; she’s a personality. If she gave you the boring answer, you wouldn’t keep asking her things.”
In 2025, we recognize this as the birth of Brand Personality in AI. Susan wasn’t just recording lines of code; she was giving a voice to a character that was designed to be helpful, yet slightly superior. That “sass” is what made Siri a cultural phenomenon rather than just a utility tool.
The Secret Life of a Global Voice
Susan revealed the strange reality of being one of the most recognized voices in history while remaining virtually anonymous for years. She didn’t even know she was “Siri” until a friend recognized her voice on the newly released iPhone 4S in 2011.
“I did the recordings in 2005 for a different company, and years later, Apple bought the technology,”she explained. “It was a shock to find out I was in everyone’s pocket.”
The Technical Grind: The Art of Concatenation
One of the most fascinating parts of our 2017 session was Susan describing the process of “building” a voice. She spent hours in a booth recording nonsensical phrases and sounds that would later be chopped up and reassembled by computers to form any sentence a user might ask.
“It’s called concatenation,” she noted. “I had to read for four hours a day, five days a week, for an entire month. You have to maintain the same pitch and tone the entire time, or the computer won’t be able to stitch it together.”
Looking back from 2025, that manual labor was the foundation for the “Neural Text-to-Speech” we use today. Susan was the pioneer who proved that a computer could sound human—if it had the right human to start with.
2025 Retrospective: The Legacy of the First “Digital Friend”
Today, Susan Bennett is celebrated as the “Voice of a Generation.” Her 2017 session on Scoop B Radio was a moment to pull back the curtain on the woman who taught us how to talk to our machines.
| Era | Primary AI Voice Tech | The “Personality” Factor |
| 2011 (Siri Launch) | Concatenative Synthesis | Sassy, Scripted “Easter Eggs” |
| 2017 (The Interview) | Hybrid Neural Networks | Helpful, Sarcastic, Witty |
| 2025 (Current) | Generative Large Language Models | Empathetic, Conversational, Limitless |
As Susan told me:
“Computers are only as smart—and as funny—as the people who program them.”
In the end, Siri’s refusal to divide zero by zero wasn’t a glitch; it was a “buttoned-up” design choice to remind us that there was a person, like Susan, on the other side of the glass.
