Pat Trumble Fleet is an American

voice actress Voice acting is the art of performing voice-overs to present a character or provide information to an audience. Performers are called voice actors/actresses, voice artists, dubbing artists, voice talent, voice-over artists, or voice-over talent ...

. Widely recognized for the tens of thousands of recordings she has made for US telephone companies such as

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas in ...

Qwest Qwest Communications International, Inc. was a United States telecommunications carrier. Qwest provided local service in 14 western and midwestern U.S. states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dako ...

, the former

Bell System The Bell System was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for over one hundr ...

companies, and others since 1981, she is still most recognized as the person who says "AT&T" in the company's

sound trademark A sound trademark or sound logo or audio logo is a trademark where sound is used to perform the trademark function of uniquely identifying the commercial origin of products or services. In recent times, sounds have been increasingly used as trade ...

,Keppel, Bruce.
"This Is the Voice of AT&T"
'. ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

''. July 20, 1989.

United States Patent Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alex ...

. "Trademark Document"
U.S. Patent Office Sensory Mark Registration Number: 1573864
'. AT&T Intellectual Property II, L.P., 1989. Trademark Record.

U.S. Patent Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexa ...

April 6, 1989. which played prior to any operator assisted or credit card paid call, and on answer when calling AT&T customer service numbers. She is also the voice for most "

star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...

" services (e.g.

last-call return Last-call return, automatic recall, or (on PBX and centrex service) camp-on, is a telecommunication feature offered by telephony service providers to subscribers to provide the subscriber with the telephone number, and sometimes the time, of th ...

, call blocking, etc.) for

local telephone companies, and the voice heard when making AT&T handled calls through 1-800-CALL-ATT (225-5288) and through international AT&T access numbers such as USADirect.

History

In 1981, working alongside

Jane Barbe Jane Barbe ( ; July 29, 1928 – July 18, 2003) was an American voice actress and singer. She was known as the "Time Lady" for the recordings she made for the Bell System and other phone companies. The ubiquity of her recordings eventually made he ...

, she began recording messages for the

Audichron Company Audichron Company was a company founded in the 1930s by John Franklin in Doraville, Georgia, to produce the Audichron, a talking clock. By the 1970s, there were thousands of Audichron time-of-day announcers in use all over the world. Audichron had ...

(now known as ETC) announcing

time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measured with a thermometer. Thermometers are calibrated in various temperature scales that historically have relied o ...

and

weather Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the ...

, and was the voice of the

's Automated Coin Toll System, quoting rates and collecting charges for coin paid calls. In addition, she continues to be the voice for a significant number of telephone company intercept recordings - messages giving reasons for call failure that start with a

special information tone In telephony, a special information tone (SIT) is an in-band international standard call progress tone consisting of three rising tones indicating a call has failed. It usually precedes a recorded announcement describing the problem.BOC Notes on th ...

and usually begin with the phrase "We're sorry...". Through the years, her voice became well known through the

phone companies A telephone company, also known as a telco, telephone service provider, or telecommunications operator, is a kind of communications service provider (CSP), more precisely a telecommunications service provider (TSP), that provides telecommunicat ...

' use of her recordings, and through several AT&T internal customer studies it was determined that customers preferred her voice over any other. As a result, she was selected to become the company's signature sound for the AT&T trademark in 1989.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Fleet, Pat 1943 births American voice actresses Telephone voiceover talent Bell System Actresses from Dayton, Ohio Living people 21st-century American women

History

See also

References

External links