Barbra Streisand, the owner of two Oscars, ten Grammys, five Emmys, a Tony, and a basement that is a goddamn mall (really), has a problem that many of us non-celebrated plebeians have encountered: Siri cannot pronounce her last name correctly. Instead of spending hours trying to teach her phone how to say it and writing emails to Apple like the rest of us boring normals, she took her complaint straight to the highest authority on the subject, Apple’s CEO. “[Siri] pronounces my name wrong,” Streisand told NPR, “ And so what did I do? 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 Sep. 30.” Currently Siri says the name with the second S sounding like a Z, but really it should be, as Babs helpfully explains, “Streisand with a soft S, like sand on the beach. I’ve been saying this for my whole career.” While she’s making demands, she should put in a word for her former Yentl co-star — legendary actor Mandy Patinkin is known to the AI only as “Mandy Paddin-kin.”
