Julie Seitter
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Julie Seitter (née Julie Stinneford) is a professional voice talent who can be heard as "Julie", the
interactive voice response Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer-operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interac ...
agent for
Amtrak The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, doing business as Amtrak () , is the national passenger railroad company of the United States. It operates inter-city rail service in 46 of the 48 contiguous U.S. States and nine cities in Canada ...
's automated information and reservation telephone system. Julie's positive voice personality—described as "spunky", "tirelessly chipper", "perky", "unshakably courteous", and "reassuring"—has been cited as one of the reasons for the success of the Amtrak system. Upon the automated system's confirmation of a caller's spoken instruction, Seitter's recorded voice would cheerily intone, "Great!" or "Got it!", while a
speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ...
failure might prompt the message, "I'm sorry, I'm having trouble understanding you..." On
Valentine's Day Valentine's Day, also called Saint Valentine's Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, is celebrated annually on February 14. It originated as a Christian feast day honoring one or two early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine and, thr ...
in 2002, Seitter's voice was featured, in character, in a humorous
National Public Radio National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...
story, and Seitter's Amtrak persona was parodied in a recurring ''
Saturday Night Live ''Saturday Night Live'' (often abbreviated to ''SNL'') is an American late-night live television sketch comedy and variety show created by Lorne Michaels and developed by Dick Ebersol that airs on NBC and Peacock (streaming service), Peacock. ...
'' sketch in 2005–2006, with
Rachel Dratch Rachel Susan Dratch (born February 22, 1966) is an American actress, comedian, and writer. After she graduated from Dartmouth College she moved to Chicago to study improvisational theatre at The Second City and ImprovOlympic. Her breakthrough r ...
as "Julie". Seitter made a one-time appearance on ''
Jeopardy! ''Jeopardy!'' is an American game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given gene ...
'' as a contestant on February 28, 2006. , Seitter resided in Littleton, Massachusetts with her husband and two children.


Amtrak agent

The
speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ...
-based Amtrak system using recordings of Julie's voice as an automated reservation agent premiered in April 2001, and soon garnered a caller approval rating of over 90% while saving the railway system an estimated more than $13 million. Seitter recorded herself for the "Julie" system (which the rail network named for her) working out of a basement studio in her Massachusetts home. She later moved, and now works out of a room in the attic of a new house.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Seitter, Julie American voice actresses Contestants on American game shows Living people People from Littleton, Massachusetts Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) Actresses from Massachusetts 21st-century American women