RUSH: Barbra Streisand’s ticked off, but only at Siri. Have you heard about this? Barbra Streisand’s mad, not at Obama not going down to Louisiana, no, she’s mad that Siri mispronounces her name. 

This is incredible.  Barbra Streisand was on NPR. I don’t know how it even came up, but she started complaining that Siri isn’t any good because it mispronounces her name. It calls her “Streizand” instead of “Streisand.”  The soft “S” is pronounced as a “Z” by Siri. 

So she said she called the head of Apple, that would be Tim Cook, and Tim Cook said (paraphrasing), “Okay, I personally will fix it.  We’re gonna put out an update to iOS 10 on September 30th and we will fix the way Siri pronounces your name.” 

Now, a couple things.  Barbra Streisand can fix the way Siri pronounces her name on her iPhone or iPad right now, and so can you.  You can go to your phone, you can call up Siri and tell it how to pronounce your name.  Just say, “My name is pronounced X.”  You can tell Siri, “Please call me superstar. Please call me whatever.”  And Siri will refer to you as that from now on.  It’s a server side update.  Tim Cook doesn’t have to go in and issue a software update to change the way Siri pronounces words.  They can do that on the Siri server site. 

So I don’t know what she’s talking about. So the iOS 10 update on September 30th, if there is one, would be a patch, ’cause iOS 10’s gonna come out around I’m guessing 15th or 16th, something in there, and if they come out with a thing on September 30th it would be 10.0.1 or some little patch, but there’s no reason to think Streisand knows what she’s talking about. 

Anyway, that’s what she’s upset about is the way Siri — (interruption) You didn’t know you could change the way Siri pronounces your name?  All you gotta do is call Siri up, my name, any name, like let’s say that you have a friend with a name that you want to tell Siri to pronounce.  How many people know you can do this?  You call up Siri, say, “Hey, Siri, send a message to my wife.”  If on your wife’s contact card on your contacts app, you list her as your spouse, then Siri will know. 

If you have a friend with a weirdly pronounced name.  (laughing)  That’s cause it’s your phone.  It’s asking you what your wife’s name is. You don’t have a wife, but you can say whatever you want to say there.  But if it’s a card, if it’s a contact card in your contacts app, then Siri will forever know that whoever that contact is is your wife.  All you have to do is, if you’ve got a friend with a weird sounding name or it’s hard to pronounce it, or doesn’t pronounce the way it’s spelled, you can simply tell Siri how the name is pronounced, and she will know from then on out.  Streisand doesn’t need an update for this.