Apple tells Jon Briggs to Shhh-up and keep Siri on the down-low

Appearing in any Apple commercial or technology can clearly be a double-edged sword. On the one hand it could mean instant fame (Hello Mr. Long and Hodgman), and on the other hand it could mean having a PR representative calling you up to ask you to shush-up about your involvement with a new technology. Just ask Jon Briggs, a British voiceover artist who’s kinda famous for his involvement in The Weakest Link; he is now also the famous voice behind Siri over in the UK.

Scansoft, back in 2005, paid Briggs to record 5,000 sentences over a three week period for their voice recognition app that eventually was morphed into Nuance. His voice stuck, and now it’s that famous, sometimes dastardly Siri that Apple has pushed out to the wild with the iPhone 4S.

Turns out Briggs got a call from Apple asking him to keep quiet about his involvement with Siri, to which he replied, “Umm, I don’t have a contract with you.” Okay, to be fair, we paraphrased that quote, but the gist is the same:

Mr Briggs however pointed out that he had recorded the thousands of sentences used to create the British Siri persona “Daniel” six years ago for another company and had never had a contract with Apple.

That’s where it ended. Apple hasn’t been back in touch. What can I say? Kudos to Briggs for sticking up for himself. This is also the part of the article where we ask Jon Briggs if he’d be so kind as to record an intro for our video podcast. Hopefully he reads our site.

Source: The Telegraph

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.