This lady is the voice of SkyTrain
This lady is the voice of SkyTrain
Hop on a SkyTrain and you’ll hear a woman’s voice on the public address system, telling you what line you’ve boarded and what station is coming up next.
Well, that voice belongs to Laureen Regan, president of Regan Productions, a video production company in Calgary, Alberta.
She’s been the voice of the SkyTrain since 2001, when the Millennium Line opened and new station announcements were required. We brought her back again when the Canada Line and Evergreen Extension opened to record additional announcements.
Regan heard her voice on the train system for the first time shortly after the Millennium Line began service.
“I took the train and I laughed,” she says. “It was so amazing to hear it—to sit there and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s my voice.’ You remembered when you recorded it. … And everybody has no idea, which makes you laugh.”
Regan came to be the voice of the SkyTrain through her connection to Interalia, another Calgary-based company.
Interalia makes automated voice systems, and knew Regan had done voice work for her own productions in the past. They asked her to do a demo voice for their system, which they were about to show to TransLink for the Millennium Line.
Then, when TransLink bought the Interalia system, Regan was asked to record the real announcements for the trains.
Recording wasn’t too tough.
“Millennium Line is hard to say, I’ve got to say,” she says. “But I don’t remember any of the names being particularly difficult. The challenge sometimes with recording for places you don’t know is that you may not know the proper pronunciation [of local names].”
It’s a challenge she’s faced again over the years.
Regan has also done voice work for the Salt Lake City train system and the BART trains in San Francisco, both through Interalia
The chance to do voice work like this has been a gift, she says.
“It’s not been something that I’ve planned—it just happened. I enjoy it every time I do voicing. I love it.”
Listen to the Podcast
Regan’s interview was conducted as part of the Buzzer blog podcast. Have a listen!
This post originally appeared in the October 10, 2008 issue of The Buzzer.
So the Skytrain announcements are all recorded with the words fully spoken?
I guess that means the bus announcements are spoken by a different person as I think they use broken up phonetic sound bites to put together the stop names.
Hi Aaron, that is correct! For example, it plays the same “The next station is…” clip at each of the station and finishes off the sentence with the station it is at. You can learn more about our bus announcements in this post: http://buzzer.translink.ca/2009/02/a-little-more-about-the-talking-buses/.
Great interview, loved hearing her speaking voice too.
One of the best decisions Translink has made was to retain her services. Let’s hope there will be more extensions in the not-too-distant future! As the Millennium Line eventually gets closer to UBC, I suggest renaming Production Way-University Station to Production Way-SFU Station at the appropriate time (or sooner?).
I used to ride the buses, Skytrain and Seabus a lot when I was a kid in the 90’s and through up until quite recently (I started driving) and never noticed a difference in the voice. I used to think it was all computer generated. Now that I have read this, I can tell difference between the Skytrain recordings and the recordings on the trolly buses.
1:24 on the podcast
Lay down the tracks
It’s a SkyTrain pun