Waaaaay back in the day, when I was an undergraduate student at The University of Akron, I worked as a student assistant in the Department of Telcommunications. My first job there was as an operator for the campus switchboard and for a while I was the only male working there. Which had an interesting side effect that my female colleagues could transfer difficult calls to me in the absence of a manager and I could throw a little extra bass in my voice to sound like someone with authority. We played to the stereotypes.
Later on, I got additional responsiblity and helped with scheduling and timekeeping – and eventually was more of an office manager. One task I was asked to do was to help with some recordings.
At the time, all of the residence halls had landline phones in each room for student use – along with voicemail. Each semester, the voicemail boxes needed to be cleared and reset – and they needed a male voice to re-record a default header for the male residence halls.
For each rooms’ mailbox, I deleted any messages, reset the password, deleted any greetings, and re-recorded the header. Over and over again. And by the time I was done, there was no one faster with that system.
I did a good enough job with this that I was asked to record the voice-mail for the Telephone repair line.
Even years after I left the department, the manager insisted that they keep that recording. Including when they migrated to a new system. So that was cool and flattering.
As things turned out, as I became the Assistant Director for the webteam as a full time employee, I also “inherited” the management of the switchboard.
(there were a couple VP’s at the time that were shuffling things around…)
Which was an interesting, though not an easy, job. I put my voice to work again occassionally/frequently answering the calls – or handling the escalated calls like the old days. Though with actual authority this time.
I also recorded the after hours message and after we switched to a phone tree instead of a staffed setup, I recorded the “press 1 for…press 2 for…” message as well.
This week, we’re making more updates to that system and it’s been decided – for more flexiblity and ease of future updates – that we’ll no longer be using a recorded voice.
Instead we’ll have a script that will be read by a generated AI voice.
I’m being replaed by a robot.
I get why we’re doing it and the voice isn’t terrible. But it does feel like the end of a 30 year long era.
As we switch over to the new system, I’m going to do one last recording with the full script and save the file. It’s my small way of backing up the machines.
Just in case they ever need a human to speak for them.