The voice of the automaton...

...or the language of Love?

Substituted again today at the small library where I used to be a storytime lady back in the late Nineties. It is fun to spend time there, see some of my favorite patrons, wonder how the kids got so grown up, and just be around books. The library's technology has changed radically since 1999, and become much more user-friendly for staff and patrons.

One of the relatively new improvements is an automated notification system for reserved books. That means that when a book reserved by a patron becomes available, the patron receives an automated phone call informing them that they can pick up the book at the library. The phone recording has a woman's voice saying something like, "This is the Broccoli Public Library calling with a message for..." Then an automaton pronounces your last name first, first name next, and middle name last. The woman's voice returns to explain that materials you have placed on hold are now available to be picked up and will be held for a certain number of days.

We used to make the phone calls ourselves. We would leave more personal messages:

This is Clementine at the Broccoli Public Library calling for Mrs. Brainly. I know you just stopped by this morning, and I hope you got home before it rained. Wouldn't you know, as soon as you left, the book you placed on reserve was returned, so we will hold it at the desk for you until Tuesday.

One of the patrons thinks my voice is the one on the new automated recording. She says it's strange to hear, since I don't really work there any more, so why would it be my voice? We joke about it for awhile, but it slowly dawns on me that I was originally so nervous about making the phone calls that my messages were very flat and jerky. Phone phobia was just one of the aspects of my anxiety disorder in the time of my divorce. So, it's not that the automaton sounds like me, but that I sounded like an automaton much of the time.

In 1979 I worked at Love Library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a job that also had its fun moments. The library received a Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind, and I spent time training on it so that I could theoretically help visually-impaired patrons with this brand new technology. The Kurzweil Reading Machine somehow scanned print material, and "read it aloud" for the user in a very mechanical synthetic "voice". This was pretty far-out sci-fi stuff in those days. Bar codes had only been used in retail stores for five years, the same year Atari launched Pong, the first video game. "Star Wars" had brought us the voice of Darth Vader just two years before. Audiotapes were still reel-to-reel. Answering machines and microwave ovens had been around a few years, but personal computers were off in the future.