Jimmy Tobin
Audio engineer at Google who submitted the episode's question about BART's synthesized announcement voices and appears as the question asker in the episode.
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Apr 6, 2026 • 14min
George and Gracie: The Robot Voices of BART
Jimmy Tobin, an audio engineer who asked why BART announcements sound garbled. Ana de Almeida Amaral, a reporter who traced the voices’ history and tech. They explore the origin of Lucent voices George and Gracie. They cover accessibility choices, aging proprietary systems, budget constraints, cultural fandom, and plans to pilot new public-address voices.
