Gene Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, was more than just his wife. She was an integral part of the Star Trek franchise so much so that Trekkies refer to her as the First Lady of Star Trek. Barrett-Roddenberry’s first role was in the franchise’s pilot episode “The Cage,” as Number One, Captain Pike’s second in command. However, the studio didn’t believe that the audience would watch a show with a woman in that position, so she was recast in Star Trek: The Original Series as Nurse Christine Chapel. Later on, she played Lwaxana Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation (her favorite role). However, Barrett-Roddenberry is also known as the voice of all the Federation’s starships and computers, and her voice inspired many popular virtual assistants today, with her son Rod Roddenberry hoping that one day her voice will “go down in posterity as the computer voice.”
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For a while, Google and Apple were working on a voice-controlled personal assistant that would be based on Barrett-Roddenberry’s voice. In a recent Geek Girl Authority interview, Roddenberry said,
Everyone thought of this when Apple and Google were coming out with their voice assistants. They reached out to my mother many years ago and asked if she would be willing to do this. Nothing ever came of it. Although, if I heard correctly, before Google’s voice assistant went public, its internal code name was “Majel.”
Unfortunately, the project didn’t come to be at the time, as her voice isn’t being used on Google Assistant or iPhones today. However, that isn’t for lack of trying.
Rod Roddenberry Has WAV Files of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry’s Voice
CBS
Rod Roddenberry also shared his vision to hear his mother’s voice on every piece of automated technology and how previous attempts have fallen through. Roddenberry said in the Geek Girl Authority interview, “I thought it was such a great idea that before she passed, I told her, and she agreed. We got a recording studio in the house, and we recorded her voice and tried to get everything phonetically. High Fidelity recorded the WAV files.”
“We approached Google once and tried to get them to incorporate it into–what I would love is that to be her voice every time we hear an automation machine. At least, I think her voice should go down in posterity as the computer voice,” added the Roddenberry Foundation director.
However, he is hopeful about the future because there is now new technology that can fill in the gaps that they were not able to record before Barrett-Roddenberry’s death in 2008. “When we talked to Google, we were missing a few elements of the phonetic sound of her voice. At the time, they suggested a voice artist come in and finish the sounds, and I felt that wasn’t authentic enough. Now, I’ve been told there is the technology that can take a sample of all this and then fill in those gaps pretty organically or make it sound organic,” said Roddenberry. “I think it’ll happen one day.”
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About The Author
Rebecca Kaplan
(150 Articles Published)
Rebecca Kaplan (she/he) has a JD and an MS but believes comics do more good than law. His work can be found at Prism Comics, MovieWeb, Geek Girl Authority, PanelxPanel, StarTrek.com and Comics Bookcase, and in Double Challenge: Being LGBTQ and a Minority, which she co-authored with his wife, Avery Kaplan.
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