“Apple has been keeping a secret from iPhone users: the company may call its new ‘humble personal assistant’ Siri, but the real name of the UK version is Daniel,” Matt Warman reports for The Telegraph. “And Daniel’s real name is Jon Briggs.”

“The ‘assistant’ allows users to talk to the latest iPhone, the 4S, just as they would a person: ‘Please send a message to…’; ‘Do I need an umbrella today?’; ‘Will you marry me?.” Warman reports. “In the UK, the voice that tells you the weather, or says, ‘We don’t even know each other that well,’ was actually recorded six years ago.”

“Jon Briggs, a former technology journalist who ‘fell into’ voice-over work, recorded ‘Daniel’ for Scansoft, which subsequently merged with Nuance, the company that works with Apple on Siri,” Warman reports. “The notoriously secretive Apple has, it should be said, asked Briggs not to talk about Siri – ‘We’re not about one person,’ they told him – but, since Briggs pointed out that he had never had a contract with them, the company has not been back in touch.”

Read more in the full article here.