Hey, Siri! Shock of fitness instructor with same name as Apple’s digital assistant who faces chorus of robotic voices when someone says her name
- Siri Price is one of around 17 women in Scotland who share the same Christian name as the AI icon
It was an iPhone feature designed to make life easier.
But a handful of women in Scotland named Siri have found that a a chorus of robotic voices now ring out out when people call their name.
Some 17 women were given the same name as Apple’s all knowing digital assistant north of the border, with 26-year-old fitness instructor Siri Price one of them.
Before Apple updated millions of its devices last month to the latest operating system to summon the digital assistant users would have to call out: ‘Hey Siri’.
But now, to the dismay of many, programmers dropped the ‘Hey’.
Siri Price has increasingly frustrated since the Apple update
Ms Price said: ‘I work in a gym with a lot of people around 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 people can’t even say my name, I’m absolutely fuming.
‘My workmates had to sit down and think of a workaround because people’s phones have been going off non-stop.’
An iPhone user herself, Ms Price said: ‘My boyfriend got the new update the other day and noticed it would wake his phone every time he spoke to me.’
It isn’t the only digital assistant to be summoned with just its name – Amazon’s wildly popular Alexa also wakes up when you say the single word.
Siri, which Steve Jobs announced as a feature of the iPhone in October 2011, dropped the requirement to say Hey as part of iOS 17.
Ms Price told The Sun: ‘I’m sure Apple could have picked something else instead – there’s plenty of people called Siri and their lives have become just unbearable because of this.’
Between 1983 and 2022, National Records of Scotland data shows, there have been 17 girls born given the name Siri.
They join the more than 100 Alexa’s born in Scotland who have to hear a robotic voice asking how they can help every time somebody calls their name.
The popularity of Alexa peaked in 2014, the same year the Amazon smart speaker was first released, when there were 39 baby girls given the name.
But according to official records no girl was given the name last year, the first time that has happened since 1990.
