How did an Australian woman who wanted to be the next Olivia Newton-John become the voice of SIRI and the confident giver of directions in than 400 million GPS and smart-enabled devices?
Also known as “GPS Girl,” today’s guest, Karen Jacobsen, never saw her device-enabled voice-future coming. It happened entirely under a shroud of secrecy, when Karen took a job that required spending days cloistered in a studio, reading tons of phrases, but never being told why. It wasn’t until a friend called years later and said “you’re on our GPS” that she finally learned what’d happened!
Behind her golden voice, though, is a much bigger story. At heart, Karen is a songwriter and singer. Her dream was always to become the next Olivia Newton-John in the United States. To take the pop music world by storm.
That dream has since led to a career not just as the voice of SIRI and GPS devices, but in music, including gigs singing the national anthem in front of massive stadiums on TV, having songs featured on hit shows, and a career as a featured keynote speaker. But, it’s also been, at times, a brutally hard road, that’s taken humility and a willingness to “get real” and even head home to recover and recalculate, then rebuild.
And, funny enough, Karen and GLP founder, Jonathan Fields, have a fun, intertwined back story that led them both to appear together on the front page of the New York Times Jobs section back in the early 2,000s.
Today, Karen takes us on her incredible journey. She shares how taking the voice-over gig completely changed her life and how it eventually reflected back on her life and her career in an entirely different way than she ever expected. And, she also ends up singing us a little something about a good, good life!
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