[HN Gopher] Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got ...
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Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got mail!" Edwards
(2024)
Author : fzliu
Score : 89 points
Date : 2025-01-14 08:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
| globalise83 wrote:
| Very enterprising on his part, and a nice reminder of the culture
| of the early-ish web.
| axus wrote:
| Somehow he wasn't acquired by private equity and given a legal
| department to negotiate annual payments for licenses to use the
| .wav files
| mnky9800n wrote:
| This always reminds me of the mst3k quip, "You've got male
| pattern baldness!"
| MisterTea wrote:
| Time Chasers is a classic. Mike's sarcastic "looks guys the
| count down on the com-pew-terrr" always cracks me up.
| echoangle wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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...
| jansan wrote:
| Wait a minute, 22 years ago his wife worked for what? "Quantum
| Computer Services"???
| jgrahamc wrote:
| 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)
| ajb wrote:
| 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.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Great analogy. They'd be using "Quantum" the same way one
| might've also used, say, "Turing Computer Services". THey
| want the legitimacy of sounding elite and beyond-the-
| cutting-edge while presumably being expert at merely
| replacing bad RAM and defragging harddisks.
|
| Early 2000's version was simply putting ".com" or ".net" in
| your company name so you sounded enticing to investors, or
| when everyone added "crypto" and to their company names.
|
| Of similar vein I expect current generation "Artificial
| Intelligence" will likely be renamed and thought of as
| quaint or audacious, like the renaming of "Modern"
| furniture aesthetic to "Mid-Century Modern".
| jgrahamc wrote:
| _might 've also used, say, "Turing Computer Services"_
|
| Might have? The number of things with Turing slapped on
| them recently is out of hand.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| By "the same way one might've also used" I meant those
| Quantum guys would've been just as likely to have used
| Turing, but yes, "Turing" is close to hitting the "jumped
| the shark" / "hackneyed" level of usage.
| NBJack wrote:
| Or HD, AI, etc.
| jansan wrote:
| Or Cloud. Oops.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Quantum was cool until Deepak Chopra ruined it for
| everybody.
|
| Quantum Mysticism is Stupid (Deepak Chopra, Spirit
| Science, Actualized.org):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQTWor_2nu4
|
| Deepak Chopra Faces a Real Theoretical Physicist:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qFGs-SIWB4
|
| >How does Deepak Chopra respond when confronted with an
| actual Theoretical Physicist? Why, he maxes out the
| nonsense generator and gibbers whatever random jargon
| pops into his head.
|
| Professor Brian Cox Enraged Deepak Chopra | CONAN on TBS:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajO5MvL9pVE
|
| >"I'm going to shove my cosmic consciousness up your
| ass!" -Enraged Deepak Chopra
| emchammer wrote:
| Tabulate. Love it.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Those are the things I like about John GC: still having fun with
| the small things in life.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Life is far to short to take it seriously all the time.
| cjrp wrote:
| That's cool, Cameo before it existed.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| 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
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