Karen Jacobsen – the Australian voice of GPS units and Apple iPhone’s ‘Siri’– presented her world famous ‘recalculate your way to business success’ to RACQ CareFlight Rescue staff and Gold Coast businesspeople today.
Karen also met with CareFlight Rescue crew whose helicopters are guided on rescue missions by the same GPS system voiced by Karen.
At today’s motivational talk, Karen told the crew and 30 Club CareFlight businesspeople of her unconventional road to worldwide fame.
The Mackay local was living in New York, following her dream of becoming a professional singer when she auditioned for a voice acting job.
“A client was looking for a native Australian voice-over artist living in the United States,” Karen said. “I immediately thought, this job was made for me!”
Karen scored the job and spent 50 hours in the studio lending her voice to a new text-to-speech voice recognition system, which ended up being used by Garmin GPS.
The technology, and Karen’s voice, was then sold to Apple for use as the voice of SIRI.
“These voice-over opportunities have opened up a whole lot of windows and taken me on a path I hadn’t ever considered,” she said.
The Australian born, New York-based entertainer, singer, voice-over artist and songwriter now travels the world performing her motivational talks.
She regularly teaches New York’s business elite the ‘Five Directions for Recalculating’ and ‘How to be your own GPS’.
Karen has also created a personal development podcast called Directions For Life, has shot a pilot for a TV show called Travel the World With the GPS Girl and published a book called The GPS Girl’s Road Map for Your Future.
Karen’s voice is known world-wide and even her young son instantly recognised his mother’s voice coming from an iPhone.
“I wonder if he thinks everyone’s mummy is in their iPhone,’ she laughed.
Club CareFlight is a select group of community-minded businesses who make annual contributions of $1000 or more to RACQ CareFlight Rescue. People can sign up at www.careflight.org.au