Who should voice the USS Enterprises computers?

Terry Farrell (aka: Dax)

 

I would rather them recycle Majel's lines. There have to be plenty of them.

 

Nana Visitor (Spelling) or Nicole De Boer from DS9

 

Ellen McLain. She played GLaDOS in Portal, a game by valve. You can find examples below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0PDGp1hL4w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfLXGeLceSk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGp-YceTOK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs

 

Weird one here, I know...on my shortwave, on one of my "conspiracy theory" channels, there is this lady, Joyce Riley, "Power Hour" (GCN Network) who, I think, sounds very much like Majel Barret Roddenberry, especially if she were reading the lines as "a computer"....just a thought...(I wonder if she's a trekie?)

 

Law & Order fans will recognize this one:

Leslie Hendrix.

(She plays the medical examiner, Dr. Rodgers. And has a very Majel-like voice)

 

Anthony Daniels or Bill Shatner

 

A company has now taken Roger Ebert's voice from commentary tracks and created a computer simulated voice. I imagine if they can do this with Ebert it should be possible to do the same with Majel Barrett.

Link

 

AviTrek thanks for sending the TVSquad link to the video.
It really sounds too synthesized. Way too much like a text-to-speech generic program.
A GPS unit sounds better than this. But then a GPS unit has a somewhat limited vocabulary.
For Trek tens of thousands of words would have to be accessible by a sampler to put together sentences. Quite possible especially if all of Majel's narration was recorded on DAT (Digital Audio Tape) with not analog tape hiss.

 

I still don't think it's a good idea. Majel had a wonderful voice, but in a strictly practical sense, a computer can be voiced by anyone.

Roger Ebert's synthesized voice is used where *his* specific voice is needed. Not the same thing at all.

 

Douglas Rain

 

Is it me or does he voice a lot of animals that don't really talk? Yeesh! Although I still think the Trek Reboot's computer voice should be female - doesn't have to be a Majel voice. Although Gates would be pretty cool though. Was watching TNG on SyFy last night and they aired that really Bev centric episode and wasn't particularily paying a whole lot of attention but her voice could be neat to hear in either nuTrek or later Trek. Although for any Post-TNG stuff I wouldn't mind Brent Spiner doing the computer voice. We've had Majel's voice as the computer for a very long time.

 

Right on, Spiff!

 

True. I've downloaded off the web WAV files of her saying dozens of things, and they could build a lot of new comments just by splicing words together. Sure, her inflection would be off occasionally, but this is a computer we're taking about: is should sound like an imperfect imitation of human speech.
A few years ago, I read about a country singer singing a duet with a male singer (Conway Twitty?) who had been dead for over a decade. They sampled his voice from songs he had recorded, then used software (autotune, maybe?) to change the tone and inflection to fit the new song. And engineer who had worked with the dead singer said it wound up sounding like him singing a song he hadn't read before, like he was singing off the sheet music and didn't really know the story so he wasn't putting a lot of emotion into it. This would be maybe a decade ago, so the process is probably better and/or cheaper now.

I had heard something similar: that women have been favored as police dispatchers since at least the 1960's due to studies that said that all people, and men especially, find a voice in the range of the typical female voice easier to hear clearly, easier to hear over background noise, easier to understand when distorted, and that it suffers less distortion when transmitted by radio and when reproduced by inexpensive speakers.
So, some of it is social or psychological or maybe even physiological, but some of it is just physics.

 

Couldn't here voiced be mimiced by a good voice actor?

 

Were I producer at Trek I would have done this years ago: get a sampling of all of her phonetic performances and make a matrix of her voice suitable for any statements.

We know this is possible; the Simpsons actors were almost thrown out of work years ago because FOX said they didn't need them anymore.

(sorry, someone in the last 4 pages probably already said this, but I didn't have the patience to sift through all of it.)

 

Wrong right off the bat... Frank Welker does the voice of Freddy Jones on Scooby Doo. You also missed two of his more noticeable roles, Megatron and Soundwave on the Transformers. (That's right! Freddy Jones = Megatron!)

Scooby Doo was voiced by Don Messick, who also did the voice of Papa Smurf, among many, many, others.

I know my voice actors.






Sigourney Weaver would be a great choice, especially considering her role on Galaxy Quest. But my #1 vote goes to (Sorry Nichelle) Kathleen Turner!

 

That's true, but Frank Welker has been doing the voice of Scooby-Doo since Don Messick passed away in 1997...

And that post was meant to be sarcastic and/or amusing, so I deliberately skipped over Frank Welker's non-animal roles...

 

You know I have to say that I think Sigourney Weaver could do a good job with it.

 

About the Ebert voice thing, the same company also did one for George Bush. There's a website somewhere where you can type in a phrase and make George W. Bush say whatever you want. It wasn't that bad.

Considering the Enterprise computer will be saying much of the same thing as always, I bet the technology would turn out better than either Ebert or George. It is expensive though.