Streisand Took Up Her Beef With Siri With Tim Cook

Barbra Streisand must be annoyed at how often her first name is misspelled. Now, she's got another beef: how her last name is mispronounced. The 81-year-old singer is on the interview circuit to promote her new memoir My Name Is Barbra, coming out Tuesday, and in one interview airing Monday, Streisand reveals how she had to place a call to Apple CEO Tim Cook to complain about how Apple's digital assistant, Siri, said her name out loud, reports CNN.

"My name isn't [spelled] with a 'Z,'" she told Cook, per her recollection to the BBC. "It's Strei-sand, like sand on the beach." She then adds in the interview, in a flash of exasperation: "How simple can you get?" Streisand says Cook was "lovely" about the whole thing, and that he arranged for Siri's mangling of Streisand's name to be remedied. "That's one perk of fame!" Streisand laughs.

It's not the first time the EGOT winner has placed a call to an Apple bigwig for help. Back in 2016, Streisand told the Guardian how she once rang Apple co-founder Steve Jobs for technical support. "I couldn't figure out something on my computer and nobody could figure it out, no IT guy, so I said, 'Can you get Steve Jobs on the phone?'" she said, noting that Jobs had no clue how to solve her issue. So "he gave me his IT guy, who also couldn't figure [it] out," she added. "That was funny." (More Barbra Streisand stories.)