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“OK, so you have to say it with a smile, no matter what you’re saying, because the shape of your mouth makes a difference.” Kristen DiMercurio is teaching me how to sound like my Bluetooth speaker.
“The resonance is in your chest and throat, it’s very deep, very low. You have to enunciate every consonant. I do a slight amount of airiness. I’m practically singing it, it’s very melodic. And there’s a certain rhythm: It usually goes up and then down at the end. You get that unnatural, clipped sound. I’ve never really broken it down like this … Bluetooth connected.”
And there it is. Something you’ve probably heard hundreds or thousands of times, and maybe never thought about once. DiMercurio, a voice-over actor, onscreen actor, singer, and podcaster, first went viral on TikTok last September when she revealed that she is the voice of many, many, many Bluetooth speakers, gadgets, and smart-home devices. Suddenly, she had 17 million views on one post, more than 700,000 followers, and her mentions were full of comments like “OMG did you do the Duolingo Premium voice?” and “Low battery, please recharge.”
DiMercurio—or the Bluetooth Lady as she has nicknamed herself—began taking voice-over jobs as a way to pay her New York City rent while auditioning for Broadway roles and bartending in the mid 2010s. “It took about six months before it was not my side hustle anymore, and I was recording full time,” she says. DiMercurio signed up to five or six online voice-over platforms and marketplaces, including Voices.com, Voices123, Voice Bunny, Fiverr, and Indeed. She recorded a whole bunch of backend workplace training videos (“Click next to continue”), phone tree systems (“That always gives me a jump scare when it’s me”), and one DealDash commercial which appears to still be running: She was paid just $75 for it. “At the time I didn’t have representation. I was just like ‘here are my rates.’”
Between 2015 and 2018, DiMercurio also did a lot of voice-over work for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi–connected products and tech how-to videos for everything from speakers to air purifiers. “I got something that was an internet-of-things device—probably three or four of those a week,” she says. “When I got off of those platforms, I think I had done around 9,000 jobs. I mean, we put voices in everything in the late 2010s. Rice cookers and stuff would talk to you; I did a lot of those.”
So when friends ask her, Did you do this one? or tell her that they hear her voice when they change the volume on their wireless headphones, she really doesn’t know for sure. “Some of the jobs had the names of products in them, but most were faceless usernames, the standard ‘Bluetooth connected, Bluetooth paired, Bluetooth disconnected.’ A few times I’ve run into it, but by the time it’s in a device, it’s been so compressed, and it’s not my normal speaking voice. I’m like, maybe? That might be me?”
The shape of DiMercurio’s multi-hyphenate career so far gives some insight into a few more of the boom-and-bust cycles in online culture and consumer tech, not just that manic IOT phase. Before the Bluetooth speaker years, she was part of the indie fiction podcasting scene in New York, acting in shows like Ars Paradoxica, Archive 81, and Wolf 359. “I got in when you had to explain to people what a podcast was, so there was the indie boom there,” she says. “We’d have these get-togethers, and you’d hear a voice and say ‘Doug Eiffel, is that you?’ This was the Welcome to Nightvale early days. That’s when it felt like the Wild West.”
Later, at the tail end of the 2010s, DiMercurio combined the tech work with voice-overs for commercials. “We did the auditions in person back then,” she says, “which is kind of insane to think about. I used to take the train for 45 minutes into Manhattan for 20 seconds in a booth to be like, ‘Chips Ahoy! They’re in a bag!’”
Companies would share celebrity references for the kind of sound they wanted, and between 2016 and 2019, a few years after Spike Jonze’s Her was released, featuring the AI assistant Samantha, it was Scarlett Johansson notes for almost every job. Except without the signature rasp, higher pitched and less sultry, more excitement. “I learned quickly—the client doesn’t actually know what they want,” she says.
Around this period, DiMercurio also started transitioning into voice acting for audiobooks, once again getting ahead of some big industry moves. Leading up to and during the pandemic, the likes of Audible and Spotify began pouring money into the original fiction podcast space, including some projects with big budgets and celebrity names, such as Homecoming, Black Box and Bronzeville, all attempting to innovate on more than a century of radio dramas.
DiMercurio’s opinion is that these were never going to scale in the way big tech expected (“with good mics, good actors, and a good sound designer, a $10,000 podcast can sound just as good as a $500,000 podcast”), but she still accepts occasional scripted podcast gigs, working on Caspian Studios’ Murder in HR last year. Her own labor of love is the “gay and weird” Brimstone Valley Mall, a fun comedy horror podcast set in 1999. She has written, directed, and produced two seasons of the show, which follows a bunch of demons who play in a band and work in a corn dog stand, and in which she gets to satirize her chirpy “commercial” voice as the mall announcer.
One narrative twist is that the Bluetooth Lady was not originally a gadgety person at all. After moving from New York to Los Angeles mid-pandemic in early 2021, though, she had to become a tech expert in audio and video out of necessity, to help put together audition tapes for on-camera film and TV roles and voice-over jobs for games and commercials: “Actors are basically our own little production companies now.”
Since the move, DiMercurio has worked on the fringes of the animation and video game worlds, and she’s itching to get more into animation voice acting in particular. “I’ve done a couple of those mobile gacha games, like Path to Nowhere. It’s these very cutesy, anime girls fighting things. So you go in and you talk with this really high-pitched voice. It’s so fun.” She shouts out the performances of the voice cast of the Netflix sci-fi animation Scavenger’s Reign as a recent favorite: “In the stoic character of the British actor [Wunmi Mosaku], you could still hear the heartbreak and her holding it in, it was amazing work.”
Fast forward a few years in LA, to around this time in 2024, and DiMercurio noticed one big shift. A lot of her corporate, non-client and non-customer-facing work, the industrial jobs she’d been doing in the background for years, dried up completely. “Just gone. And that was AI,” she says. “I knew all that stuff was going to get eaten up, but I thought I had a little bit more time. It was a good chunk of my income that just disappeared. It went down to 50 percent, then dwindled.”
Always planning ahead, she had already predicted she would soon be moved out of the corporate circuit because her type of voice was going out of fashion: one that’s older, with discernible vocal training and a lot of enunciation versus “a more authentic, young, hip Gen Z sound of ‘I don’t care, I’m just reading off a page,’” a persona which she does have in her repertoire but may not get booked for. “But it was AI, just like that.” One of the platforms DiMercurio recorded for in the mid-2010s, Voices.com, currently offers an AI-powered tool where you can select a professional voice actor and one of 10 conversational tones, then turn text into speech with its “Studio” feature.
Now, the game is all audiobooks, all the time, for the Bluetooth Lady and, to some extent, major platforms like Spotify, which is experimenting with pricing tiers and bundles for these formats, and has just launched a new publishing program for indie audiobook authors.
“You gotta make some quick moves,” she says. “I started auditioning more in the commercial space and jumping into audiobooks, almost full time now.” Despite the fact that startups like Speechki offer synthetic voices for this exact use case, DiMercurio is fairly confident that AI won’t take over audiobook or scripted podcast voice acting anytime soon. “We’re in a space where, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You have this big, heavy tool—AI—and we’re just smashing everything we can see with it. It has stuck in certain arenas of voice-over, the ones that don’t need to feel extremely personal. But part of the reason why fiction podcasting became a thing was the intimacy of hearing a person’s voice in your ear.”
As an actor, DiMercurio is interested in how many emotions and “micro observations” you can pick up on just by the way someone says a word. Some actors trust their gut, or do an impersonation, and others look at voice granularly, observing, re-creating, and manipulating the speed of the speech, the inflection and the placement, to function as a set of “levers” for, say, producing different audiobook characters.
When it comes to voice-over more generally, she thinks AI is now passable and that we may get to the point where it’s almost as nuanced as talking to a person, but “I don’t think it will ever hit quite the same.”
In the short term, she expects a flattening in advertising audio, similar to the sudden homogeneity in graphic design a few years ago when it seemed like all brands started to look the same. “Almost every voice you hear, there’s someone behind that,” she says, “even the AI ones were a person who recorded that at one point.” But AI voices are designed to be palatable to the widest audience possible, “therefore we’re losing the specificity, the identity, the little quirks—like nobody’s s’s whistle like mine do. You don’t think about it, you don’t even hear it, because it’s so neutral.”
Ultimately DiMercurio predicts that voice actors will become a high-end refinement in some industries. “A human voice is going to become bespoke,” she says. “We’re going to become a luxury item, almost thinking of it like artisanship. So if you’re a luxury brand, you’ll have a real person’s voice instead of AI in your commercials and in your products. In the same way that you can get handmade ceramics and bowls or you can buy them from Wal-Mart.”
A now infamous case study showing the power of a single, distinctive human voice came last May when OpenAI was forced to pause the use of its Sky voice for GPT-4o, one of five initial voices for the chatbot. This came after Scarlett Johansson—yes, her—hired legal counsel, claiming that OpenAI had imitated her after she refused a request from its CEO, Sam Altman, to license her voice for the product and after Altman had tweeted this single-word tweet: her.
OpenAI denied that Sky was intended to resemble the star, and The Washington Post then compared recordings of the Sky AI voice and those provided by an anonymous actress, reporting them to sound identical. The actress’ agent also sent the Post documents to prove that she was hired for the Sky voice role after an open casting call, months before Altman approached Johansson. The actress also said that neither Scarlett Johansson nor the movie Her were mentioned by OpenAI staff, who specified that they wanted a “warm, engaging” and “charismatic” voice.
DiMercurio refers to the whole ChatGPT ScarJo incident as a “debacle” but notes there is a funny twist related to her own voice acting. In 2023, the developers behind the Zombies, Run! fitness game released a Marvel tie-in for iPhone and Android named Marvel Move, featuring interactive adventures where you’re instructed to run around with Thor, the X-Men, and The Hulk in order to save the world.
“I got hired to play Black Widow in that game. I was thinking, ‘I finally get to do Scarlett Johansson,’” she says with a laugh. “Then we get in there and they say, ‘We don’t want this to sound like her. We want this to be completely new.’ I was like, when do I get to have my Her moment? But I got to go home and tell my mom I played Black Widow.”
Still, DiMercurio probably gets her Her moment every day, every time thousands, maybe millions of people hear the words “Bluetooth connected.”
