Jane Barbe - Life and Career

Life and Career

Barbe, a Florida native who grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, studied drama at the University of Georgia. After graduating, she worked as a copywriter, though due to her poor spelling, she opted to read her first commercial out loud to her boss instead of submitting it in writing. He asked her to record the commercial herself.

In 1963, she began recording messages for the Audichron Company (now known as ETC) announcing time, temperature and weather, as well as recordings for early voice mail systems. In the 1970s and 1980s, she regularly recorded the intercept messages used when a number is disconnected, and started sharing recording duties with (AT&T voice) Pat Fleet in 1981 who eventually took over Barbe's role. Barbe was selected to be the first voice on the Octel Communications voice mail systems and retained that role for many years. Her voice was used on all the prompts (which numbered in the thousands). Often people referred to the voice on Octel systems as "Jane" and Barbe and her husband John were named honorary life employees of Octel in 1992. Over 150 million people used Octel systems prior to the company being acquired in 1997 by Lucent Technologies.

By 2000 Jane's voice was heard by about 300 million people each week.

Through the years, Barbe's voice became well-known through the phone companies’ use of her recordings, as well as her messages recorded for customized greetings for various corporations who bought Octel voice mail systems. The time announcements she recorded for NBS (now NIST) are used on radio station WWVH.

Recordings with her voice are also used outside the United States, in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. Although her native dialect was Southern, while studying drama she learned to adopt the “General American” speech she would use for most of her work. When asked to record time and temperature messages for the Australian phone company, she perfected an Australian accent by listening to recordings of Australian speakers.