Tomorrow is the birthday of Siri, Apple's ubiquitous personal assistant since iOS 5. Although plenty of amusing siri-isms are posted all over the web, we at the Archives decided to see if Siri could recognize the voice of her forebears. To do this we used a 7" vinyl record of computer speech published by Bell Labs in 1963. You can hear the amusing results above.

Max V. Mathews was a computer music legend. In 1957 he created at Bell Labs MUSIC, the first music composition program, which had several iterations through the decades. He also experimented with electronic instruments and researched human-machine interactions. He famously wrote the musical accompaniment to John Kelly's voice-synthesized "Daisy Bell," performed in 1961 by an IBM 704 computer.

John Larry Kelly, Jr. was also a brilliant Bell Labs scientist, a gregarious Texan gunslinger with manifold interests. He created (with Carol Lochbaum) the speech synthesis system above, but may be best remembered for developing a gambling formula (based on Claude Shannon's information theory) called the Kelly criterion, which is now part of standard investment theory. Tragically, he died at age 41.

1963 Computer Speech 7" vinyl

(Bell Labs/NYPR Archives)

"Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)" was written by English songwriter Harry Dacre in 1892. That year Dacre was visiting the United States and complained to a friend about the duties levied on the bike he had brought. When his friend commented that he was lucky not to have brought with him "a bicycle built for two," (since then the duties would double), Dacre was inspired to write the song that became his biggest hit.

You may remember "Daisy Bell" as the song that the computer HAL 9000 creepily sings as he is powered down in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is because the movie's screenwriter, Arthur C. Clarke, happened to hear John Kelly's speech synthesis experiment while visiting a friend at Bell Labs.

Can your personal assistant recognize the audio above? Let us know in the comments section.

Thanks to David Satkowski for the use of his shiny new iPhone 6 and to Andy Lanset for the disc.