Facebook Synthetic Voice Job

Sooooo, it’s high time I announce that I did the name pronunciation feature for Facebook.  Every single account in the US, all 162.9 million of them, has this feature available, should they want to use it.  Here are the instructions to enable it on your own page.

Doing this job was a crazy process.  I learned how to read the international phonetic alphabet and everything.  It took a few months of chipping away at it a little everyday to crank out the 500 most popular names for males and females (as well as last names).  Then, Facebook uses some crazy algorithm to pull all the phonemes from the files and enter them into a giant database that is accessed every time it needs to compile a name.  Beyond a national commercial, this is definitely the most exposure my voice has had, so I’m pretty excited about the gig.  I wasn’t sure if they would ever use it which is why I had one of those, ‘hey that’s me!’ moments when I was first alerted to the new feature.  Check it out for yourself!