What’s the problem

Siri is Apple’s voice assistant that uses a speech generator to speak text. It copes well with the vast majority of words we are used to, but sometimes it can fail with unfamiliar, special words such as first and last names that are not in the program’s memory. Something similar happened to the singer.

In Ukrainian, we write the surname with the letter “z” – Streisand. However, in English the name is written as “Barbra Strei”.SAccording to the rules, if the letter “s” is among the vowels, it will sound closer to “z” when pronounced – as in the words rise (raɪz), these (ðiːz), please (pliːz). However, the singer prefers to hear the full letter “s” in her surname.

My name is not spelled with the letter “Z”. This is “Strei sand”, like sand on the beach. What could be simpler?
– says Barbra Streisand.

Fortunately, Cook was ready to ease his concerns and set things right: “Tim Cook was so sweet. He got Siri to change her pronunciation. I guess that’s one of the perks of being famous.”, – says the singer, without explaining whether he directly called Cook’s personal number or the Apple office with a request to call the head of the company on the phone. I wish customer support was always this fast and available!

BBC reporter Mark Savage ran a pronunciation test on the recording, asking Siri “Dad, Can You Hear Me?” He asked who sang his song. – the system responded exactly as Barbra Streisand wanted.