Siri — now “Siz” — Price. (Source: Instagram)
With iOS 17 meaning users no longer have to say “Hey” when invoking Siri, Edinburgh-based personal trainer Siri Price says she’s had to change her name.
Apple added the ability to say “Hey, Siri” with iOS 8 in 2014, and according to the UK’s The Sun newspaper, Siri Price and friends learned to cope with that.
“I work in a gym with a lot of people around,” she told the publication, “so everyone learned quite quickly not to say ‘Hey’ when they greet me or there would be a lot of bleeping going on. It was annoying but manageable.”
Now with iOS 17, however, Apple’s voice assistant can be invoked by just saying the name “Siri.”
“Now people can’t even say my name,” continued Price. “I’m absolutely fuming.”
“My boyfriend got the new update the other day,” she said, “and noticed it would wake his phone every time he spoke to me.”
“My workmates had to sit down and think of a workaround,” she continued, “because people’s phones have been going off non-stop.”
Her solution has been to have people call her “Siz” instead.
The Sun newspaper is controversial in the UK, to say the absolute least, and its accuracy on this story appears to be lacking, too. It claims that Price’s name means a “beautiful woman who leads you to victory,” which is correct.
But then it says that Apple made up the name Siri as an acronym that stands for “Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface.”
Instead, Dag Kittlaus, one of the co-founders of the original firm that developed Siri, said in 2012 that it was named after a person.
“I worked with a lady named Siri in Norway and wanted to name my daughter Siri and the domain was available,” he said. “And also consumer companies need to focus on the fact that the name is easy to spell, easy to say.”
Siri Price may feel that the name is too easy to say, but she isn’t the only person who wishes Siri had a different name. According to Kittlaus, Steve Jobs simply disliked the name — but couldn’t think of a better one.
