Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got mail!" Edwards (2024)

https://blog.jgc.org/2024/11/personalized-voice-recordings-by-elwood.html

by fzliu • 2 years ago

96 33 2 years ago

blog.jgc.org

Very enterprising on his part, and a nice reminder of the culture of the early-ish web.

axus• 2 years ago

Somehow he wasn't acquired by private equity and given a legal department to negotiate annual payments for licenses to use the .wav files

mnky9800n3• 2 years ago

This always reminds me of the mst3k quip, "You've got male pattern baldness!"

MisterTea2• 2 years ago

Time Chasers is a classic. Mike's sarcastic "looks guys the count down on the com-pew-terrr" always cracks me up.

mnky9800n3• 2 years ago

It’s probably the best episode. That and over drawn a the memory bank. Overdrawn is my favourite episode by far. I love Raul Julia is wonderful and the cast really makes it a movie worth watching without mst3k. It presents such a weird view of future life. It’s as if it’s made by an alien that doesn’t really understand human culture and experiences. Like how has being “Doppled” into animals actually become the de facto treatment for scrolling up cinemas at work? Why are movies banned? If a person did actually have some blank Brain because of doppling why was that news to the woman whose job it is to dopple? Why is there an evil ceo of a mega corporation trying to control his mind? And are we really to believe that because Finkle can figure out how to scroll up cinemas he can hack the Gibson? The movie just generates questions after questions. Like why is the CEO mad about this? Did they just discover a way to put a persons mind in a computer and allow them to create any reality they want? Why is this a bad thing? It sounds like it would print money forever. Why does no one realise this and everyone conspire against Finkle? Which side is Apolonia on? She works for the mega corporations but her colleague who is getting fat on flavofibes is secretly reporting Apolonias decisions to the ceo.

Like tbh I think the movie is some kind of creative genius. Because it also has a crazy aesthetic. This weird vhs aesthetic that also has this kind of vision of the future where everyone is forced to wear grey suits in some sort of Orwellian capitalist nightmare. But everything is shot like it’s a two camera television studio setup. Interspersed with on location shots. So the studio has this weird soft lighting and the location shots all look like they are natural light.

The only thing I can compare it to is Twelve Monkeys. Yes I just equated Overdrawn at the Memory Bank to Twelve Monkeys. But I love this movie and I feel like everyone gives honest performances and it creates something totally unique. The world that exists inside of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank exists no place else.

echoangle• 2 years ago

Maybe I missed it but the article doesn't seem to contain the original sound. Here's a YouTube upload of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzRC37grckk

yladiz• 2 years ago

I wonder how many recordings he did. I hope that more people come out of the woodwork and share the recordings they bought from him, like in this case, especially if there are some slightly silly ones (like "Use the source, Luke!").

Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.

HeatrayEnjoyer• 2 years ago

Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.

I have bad news about the state of voice cloning...

digitallis42• 2 years ago

There was an entire skit series, numerous videos and interviews... Just about the only confounder is that he used many voices and accents.

jansan2• 2 years ago

Wait a minute, 22 years ago his wife worked for what? "Quantum Computer Services"???

jgrahamc4• 2 years ago

Quantum was one of those words that sounded really cool (back then). Just look at TV shows like Quantum Leap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Leap_(2022_TV_series)) or Sinclair's QL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL)

ajb2• 2 years ago

Amusingly this is true of an older discovery that now seems very commonplace: vibration, around the time that scientists understood the simple harmonic oscillator, and the fact that the same mathematics applies to lots of things from sounds to pendulums. So to make their nonsense sound sciencey, spiritualists started talking about vibrations as well.

Not sure if there are any older examples.

emchammer• 2 years ago

Tabulate. Love it.

the_jeremy• 2 years ago

Not the same company, but similar: I have some old T-shirts advertising tape drives from Quantum when my dad worked for them in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Corporation

They were a tape drive and hard drive manufacturer. I guess they still have the tape drive section, but they sold their HDD division to ... Maxtor, which then got bought out by Seagate, I think?

Moosturm• 2 years ago

Those are the things I like about John GC: still having fun with the small things in life.

jgrahamc4• 2 years ago

Life is far to short to take it seriously all the time.

cjrp• 2 years ago

That's cool, Cameo before it existed.

dhosek• 2 years ago

I used to have somewhere an audio file of Andy Richter (from Late Night with Conan O’Brien—and other projects, but this was during the Late Night era) saying, “Well, you’ve got mail, but it’s probably crap” that I used as my alert sound for mail. I kind of miss that.

choult• 2 years ago

Mine was the clip from Holy Grail where Eric Idle is hit by an arrow - "Message for you sir"

https://movie-sounds.org/comedy-movie-sounds/quotes-with-sou...

roskelld• 2 years ago

AOL Desktop is still a thing in 2025 and was updated as recently as a few days ago.

Michael MJD just did a video on it. Still contains Elwood's classic soundbites, along with some snazzy images of current pop stars like Avril Lavigne.

https://youtu.be/jUsym8iAWHY?si=vU5I15-qWKaEZPwC

jbaber• 2 years ago

I was pretty sympathetic to the idea that this must be AOL taking care of customers continuously for decades until that quick mention that you start by downloading a .exe over plain http.

dang• 2 years ago

Recent and related:

Elwood Edwards, voice of AOL's 'you've got mail' alert, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42087087 - Nov 2024 (41 comments)

with additional comments by jgrahamc, starting here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42087330

jgrahamc4• 2 years ago

Thanks, dang! It was that HN post and comments that got me to make the effort to find the old emails and recordings and post this.

Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got mail!" Edwards (2024)

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