Background
Barbe was born in Winter Haven, Florida, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia.
Barbe was born in Winter Haven, Florida, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia.
She studied drama at the University of Georgia.
She was known as the "Time Lady" for the recordings she made for the Bell System and other phone companies. The ubiquity of her recordings eventually made her a popular-culture figure, and her death drew national attention. After graduating, Barbe worked as a copywriter, though due to her poor spelling, she opted to read her first commercial out loud to her boss instead of submitting it in writing.
He asked her to record the commercial herself.
In 1963, she began recording messages for the Audichron Company, announcing time, temperature and weather, as well as recordings for early voice mail systems In the 1970s and 1980s, she regularly recorded the intercept messages used when a number is disconnected or number dial errors, and started sharing recording duties with American Telephone & Telegraph Company voice Pat Fleet in 1981, who eventually took over Barbe"s role.
Barbe was selected to be the first voice on the Octel Communications voice mail systems and retained that role for many years. Her voice was used on all the prompts (which numbered in the thousands).
Over 150 million people used Octel systems prior to the company being acquired in 1997 by Lucent Technologies.
By 2000, Barbe"s voice was heard by about 300 million people each week. Through the years, Barbe"s voice became well-known through the phone companies" use of her recordings, as well as her messages recorded for customized greetings for various corporations who bought Octel voice mail systems The time announcements she recorded for NBS (now The National Institute of Standards and Technology) are still used on radio station WWVH. Her voice was also heard on hotel wake up calls and commercial elevator messages.
Recordings with her voice are also used in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.
Although her native dialect was Southern, she learned to adopt her trademark "General American" speech while studying drama. When asked to record 1500 time and temperature messages for the Australian phone company, she perfected an Australian accent by listening to recordings of Australian speakers.
Barbe died from cancer in Roswell, Georgia, on July 18, 2003. She was 74 years old.
As a result of her extensive work, she was an early member and a board member of the Atlanta branch of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.