Barbra Streisand, owner of two Oscars, 10 Grammys, five Emmys, and a Tony Award, is—incredibly—still having to deal with mispronunciations of her last name. She’s on a crusade to end it once and for all—and not being human is no excuse.
On Saturday, Streisand told NPR’s Scott Simon about the latest offender: Apple’s voice-controlled assistant, Siri.
“She pronounces my name wrong. Streisand with a soft ‘s’ like sand on the beach,” she said. “I’ve been saying this for my whole career.”
While Apple users can teach Siri how to pronounce names correctly, Streisand took her complaint straight to the top. In the NPR interview she said:
I called the head of Apple, Tim Cook, and he delightfully agreed to have Siri change the pronunciation of my name finally, with the next update on September 30th. So let’s see if that happens, because I will be thrilled.
Streisand might be “thrilled” before then, as according to Macrumors.com, the release date of iOS 10 could be even earlier than Sept. 30.
During the June 28 episode of Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, guest John Mayer and host Andy Cohen both erred, calling the 74-year-old star Strize-and, turning the soft second “s” of her surname in to a “z” sound. And in a recent profile of the singer-actor-comedian, the New York Times wrote that the mispronunciation “has plagued her at least since she first appeared on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ in the early 1960s.”