Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got mail!" Edwards
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.
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...
Maybe I missed it but the article doesn't seem to contain the original sound. Here's a YouTube upload of it:
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.
> 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...
This always reminds me of the mst3k quip, "You've got male pattern baldness!"
Time Chasers is a classic. Mike's sarcastic "looks guys the count down on the com-pew-terrr" always cracks me up.
That's cool, Cameo before it existed.
Very enterprising on his part, and a nice reminder of the culture of the early-ish web.
Somehow he wasn't acquired by private equity and given a legal department to negotiate annual payments for licenses to use the .wav files
Those are the things I like about John GC: still having fun with the small things in life.
Life is far to short to take it seriously all the time.
Wait a minute, 22 years ago his wife worked for what? "Quantum Computer Services"???
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?
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)
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.
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".
might've also used, say, "Turing Computer Services"
Might have? The number of things with Turing slapped on them recently is out of hand.
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.
Or HD, AI, etc.
Or Cloud. Oops.
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
Tabulate. Love it.
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