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Re:Stephanie, open-source virtual assistant built to control... by SwellJoe on Sunday June 11, 2017 @03:35AM (#14531096)
I dated the woman who did the voice for Google Voice (the voicemail service). She moved out to CA with me when my company got accepted to YC and she got a job at Google. I dunno exactly how she ended up doing the voice for it, but it's always been vaguely surreal to hear her answering my phone (I use Google Voice, and last I listened she was still the voice ~9 years later). It's not that big of a deal, more of a weird anecdote (that I've very rarely had occasion to tell before now) than anything traumatic.

Seems like a personal assistant voice would be kinda the same. Though maybe you hear it more often. But, it's probably not something that happens very often. I mean, how many personal assistant voices are there, and how many people can they have dated?

Re:Stephanie, open-source virtual assistant built to control... by eloisant on Sunday June 11, 2017 @05:35AM (#14531342)
Don't personal assistant use voice synthesis rather than voice acting?
Re:Stephanie, open-source virtual assistant built to control... by yorwba on Sunday June 11, 2017 @06:45AM (#14531480)
AFAIK, the state of the art in voice synthesis still involves concatenating recorded snippets. Even fancy neural networks need recordings to train on, and will most likely sound similar to the original voice actor.