Several years ago, Jon Briggs took a voiceover job for a company called Scansoft. Scansoft later merged with Nuance, which makes the voices that Apple used for Siri.
Briggs tells the UK Telegraph:
“I did a set of recordings with Scansoft five or six years ago, for text-to-speech services,” says Briggs. “Five thousand sentences over three weeks, spoken in a very particular way and only reading flat and even. Then they go away and take all the phonics apart, because I have to be able to read anything you want, even if I’ve never actually recorded all those words.”His voice, which is very familiar to United Kingdom iPhone 4S owners, is also used as the voice of GPS for Garmin, TomTom, Jaguar, Land Rover, Audi and Porsche.
The result, Briggs says is “as close to human speech as anything that’s out there. It gets everything right, more or less, apart from the inflection.”
For its part, Apple isn't pleased with Briggs' newfound fame. A representative called him after
72 comments
Target's inventory system may be leaking details on upcoming Apple products that are set to be released in the near future. A listing for "Airpods (X Generation)" with a price tag of...
Slickwraps, a company that develops skins for Apple devices like the iPhone and Mac, yesterday suffered a data breach that saw customer info like names and addresses leaked.
News of the leak...
Target's internal inventory system appears to include a listing for a product called "Apple Airpods (X Generation) priced at $399," according to multiple Target employees who got in...
With a number of products apparently just about ready to launch, we're starting to hear our first specific rumors about the possibility of an Apple media event near the end of next month,...
Despite pushback from Apple, the European Parliament in January voted overwhelmingly for new rules to establish a common charging standard for mobile device makers across the European Union. This...
Elago has released a new cover for the AirPods charging case with a retro design inspired by Nintendo's iconic Game Boy.
Available in Light Gray or Black, the cover is made of flexible,...
As noted in the MacRumors forums, the new Look Around feature in Apple Maps recently went live in three more cities in the United States, including Boston, Philadelphia, and the Washington, D.C....
Google is reportedly testing an interesting new gesture for its Pixel smartphones that lets users double-tap the back of the handset to control various functions.
XDA-Developers discovered...
