Amtrak Julie

Before you make your way to Penn Station this afternoon to board Amtrak trains to points either north or south, learn more about Julie, the automated Amtrak voice:

Amid long lines and frayed nerves typical during the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend, roughly 600,000 rail travelers nationwide will squeeze on and off trains, with one-third passing through Pennsylvania Station.

Through it all Julie will remain unshakably courteous and tirelessly chipper.

Julie is the computerized “voice of Amtrak” who helps callers navigate the railroad’s electronic answering system. But Julie is more than just an automated ticket agent. She offers a sympathetic ear and reassuring guidance. And during what is Amtrak’s busiest time of year, she goes a long way in helping the railroad quell the impatient masses.

With her spunky personality, Julie is also a trendsetter among a new breed of customer service software programs meant to be a kinder and gentler replacement to the touch-tone mazes that for years left callers aimlessly pressing “one” for this or “two” for that.

“Hi, this is Amtrak. I’m Julie,” she says in a perky tone . “O.K., let’s get started.” She is casual: “You’ll want a pen and paper handy.” She is exacting: “I think you said you want a 5 o’clock Acela to New York, am I right?” She is reassuring, interjecting “Got it!” after each of the caller’s answers. Occasionally, she is even apologetic: “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”

But who is this Julie?

. . . Julie’s affable telephone persona would not be possible without a real live Julie. And, in this case, it is Julie Stinneford, 41, who provides the voice for Amtrak’s answering system.

Ms. Stinneford did not come by her role by accident. She is a professional voice talent, as they are known in the business, and was chosen by Amtrak after it listened to her demonstration tape and those of other people who applied for the part.

Ms. Stinneford said that her two adolescent sons, 11 and 6, were unimpressed with the popularity being Amtrak’s voice had brought her. “They would rather an action hero,” said Ms Stinneford, who lives near Boston.

But friends who know of her role for Amtrak often pester her to recite Julie’s lines. “It’s weird,” said Ms. Stinneford, who said she could not disclose how much she was paid by Amtrak. “But they seem to really like the idea that a computer would say: ‘O.K., let’s get started’ and ‘got it’.”

Julie is one of many “memorable personas” within automated phone systems. The Times piece notes that some companies have taken the concept even further, “opening a new frontier in branding”:

In 2002, Yahoo hired Nuance Communications, a software company in California, to design a convincing and attractive computerized persona who would read e-mail messages over the phone to customers who use Yahoo for their e-mail. The result: Jenni McDermott, who came with a photo and a four-page biography describing how she graduated from Berkeley in 2001 with an art history degree, was unable to find work in a gallery and so settled for a job as a bartender at a local cafe.

“The bio was so detailed that I felt like I knew her personally,” said Deborah Ben-Eliezer, 35, a voice talent from San Francisco who is the voice for Jenni. “Mostly, we just focused on making Jenni the type of girl that sets people at ease and the type of person that a stranger would want to walk up and meet.”

What that meant was upbeat tone, peppy cadence, impeccable diction, informal quips like “Got it!” and “cool” and a sprinkling of flattery: “Wow, you’re popular!” she says to callers with crowded in boxes.

Some computer personas turn out to be less popular, Mr. Balentine said. Sprint PCS, for example, designed a persona named Claire who “ended up being very nice but entirely incompetent,” Mr. Balentine said. Claire could not recover when callers mispronounced words, he said, and she was unable to sift out background noises.

“Too many companies make the mistake of thinking that if they design an attractive guide, they don’t need to design a navigable maze,” he said, adding that Sprint no longer used Claire. Sprint did not return or respond to several calls and e-mail messages seeking comment about Claire.

Finally, there’s also the challenge of picking the correct gender:

Setting the right tone for computer personas can also be a challenge. Mercedes-Benz had to change the on-board software in some of its cars after male customers complained that they did not like taking driving directions from a female voice.

Bonus point: Jessica Ettinger’s Sunday Styles wedding notice