Phone-recording stalwart dies at 74

Jane Barbe, whose voice was familiar to millions of telephone users across the country who ever dialed a wrong number or had to "Please listen to the following options" in a voice-mail system, died July 18 in Roswell, Ga., of complications from cancer. She was 74.

Mrs. Barbe was the queen of telephone recordings. Her friendly but authoritative voice was heard an estimated 40 million times a day in the 1980s and early 1990s on everything from automated time-and-weather messages to hotel wake-up calls.

During her unusual 40-year career, she articulated immortal lines including, "At the tone, the time will be 7:22 and 40 seconds," "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service," and "Please press one for more options."

Her voice was everywhere, but especially, as Ted Koppel once noted on a segment of "Nightline" devoted to the topic, in "voice-mail jail."

She was not the only person who recorded voice mail and other automated phone messages, but she likely did it longer than anyone else.

"I think she was probably one of the first," said Pat Fleet, who has been in the telephone voice-recording business for 25 years and is known as the AT&T Lady for her work for the telecommunications giant.

Mrs. Barbe did most of her recordings for Atlanta-based Electronic Telecommunications, which at one time produced as many as 2,000 voice-messaging systems for businesses and government agencies, and for Octel Communications, which is now a part of Bell Labs/Lucent.

In the 1980s and '90s, Mrs. Barbe was the voice on 1,000 of Electronic Telecommunications' systems, according to recording-services manager Michael Miller.

She was heard on 90 percent of "intercept messages" — the recording played when something is wrong with a phone number — and 60 percent of automated time-and-temperature calling programs.

"You hear my voice in more than 1,000 cities in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, South America, Canada. ... Vocally, I get around," she told The Chicago Sun-Times years ago.

People wrote her letters, some saying they called a certain number to hear her voice when they were lonely. When she appeared at business conventions, sometimes hundreds of people would line up for her autograph.

Mrs. Barbe, a Florida native who grew up in Atlanta, studied drama at the University of Georgia. There she learned how to remove the Southern inflections from her voice. "You haven't lived until you've heard 'Antigone' in a Southern accent," she once quipped.

In 1963 she began working for Audichron, the unit of Electronic Telecommunications that pioneered the time-weather telephone-message industry. She had to deliver her lines in clear, measured tones, without any regional accent.

Barbe is survived by her husband, John, a musician and composer of advertising jingles; a daughter; a son and seven grandchildren.