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Here's how her newest voice came into the world: Someone read aloud from a book, and Apple recorded it. Apple's goal with those recordings was to gather natural-sounding words and phonemes, or the sounds that comprise our words. To better understand the qualities of Siri's new voice, I sent clips of her speaking American English to Molly Babel, an assistant professor in the department of linguistics at the University of British Columbia. Babel asked me to record Siri saying specific words--among them pasta, pool, and boot--and a passage, well known in linguistics, that contains a plethora of word-sounds.