How to fix Siri’s ‘Barbra Streisand’ problem

Thanks to Martina/Flickr

How to make Siri pronounce names correctly.

Streisand’s pissed with Siri. So much so that a report claims singer Barbra Streisand called Apple CEO Tim Cook up to complain. What’s her problem? That Siri calls her StreiZAND, rather than StreiSAND (a Z sound, rather than an S).

Cook has promised to fix this in a future update, but it really shouldn’t bother her  too much – because it’s easy to train Siri to say her name correctly, so long as she creates a contacts entry with her name.

Here is what Streisand could do:

• Launch Siri and ask it to bring up the Contact entry for the person it is not pronouncing correctly.
• Now you say: “That’s not how you pronounce [person’s name].”
• Siri will ask you to pronounce the first name
• Pronounce it and you’ll be presented with two audio versions of the name.
• Choose the correct version.
• You’ll be asked to follow the same steps for the contact’s last name
• When you have set both first and second names Siri will repeat the name, hopefully correctly.

Another way to get the process started is to tell Siri, “Learn to pronounce [name, eg. Barbra Streisand] correctly.” So long as you have a contact record in that name, Siri will let you train it into better pronunciation.

And this is how Barbra Streisand could solve her own problem.

More Siri tips.