Customer service voice?

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I was wondering if anybody here has a customer service voice. After I was diagnosed, I tried telling my therapist that one of the reasons my diagnosis didn't make sense was because I have a customer service voice (I actually feel like my voice changes often depending on where I am/what I'm doing/how I'm feeling/who I'm with). When I am in therapy, I feel like my voice is more flat and calm than usual, and my therapist suggested that I just feel like I have a customer service voice.

I know that that isn't true, because people have commented on my customer service voice before. My boyfriend and I used to work together at a gas station, and he tells me that my customer service voice sounds like a completely different person, and used the words "almost like it's robotic" to describe it (among other things).

Like I said, I think that my voice changes often. Sometimes to the point where I've often wondered what my voice actually sounds like. Which of my voice personas is the real one?

I can usually pick up on these differences in other people as well. I hang out with one of my former high school teachers occasionally, sometimes with her friends, and it has always been so amusing to me how she sounds different at school than she does with her friends or when ordering at a restaurant (or anything else). I do the same thing, so I don't know why it amuses me so much. Maybe because she's my old teacher and I still find it weird to think of teachers with lives outside of school (despite the fact that I am a teacher now too and have a life outside of school).

Does anyone else experience any of this? Whether it be having a different voice/tone depending on the situation or recognizing when others' change?

Oh yeah. I'm brash, loud and even obnoxious around some people - and sullen and withdrawn around others. I really depends on how I feel about them, and my mood. I take the middle ground of cool, professional confidence at work.

I work in customer service at a baker's shop so I have to have a customer service voice. While I have a fairly ordinary voice, with a combination of an old-time Southern accent and a Transatlantic/Received English accent (think old movie stars LOL) I tend to speak in "scripts" or pre-recorded phrases.

Perhaps it is because I see words in my mind as I hear or speak them. It's like sitting in front of a typewriter all day long and watching text scroll (not like a computer, because the "paper" moves. Just like in an old manual typewriter.)


Prometheus18, you've said a number of times that you tend to come off as haughty, arrogant-sounding, uptight--while you're a formal kind of guy, and lots of people see that as a personal affront, could it be that it's a form of masking? I was the same way. (Now I am just a very rulebound person in my own life and wear old-school clothes. So not quite as stiff but still kind of odd.)

kmarie, you sound exactly like many, many Aspies. It's a form of masking, and that's okay. Maybe you can change it if you want to, but if it makes interactions easier instead of harder, then it's not to worry.

Yes. Every time I answer the phone at work, people think they're getting a recording.

I've also been told I have a weird accent, even though I work close to where I grew up. Flat affect, I guess.

Used to be expert at masking in a work enviroment. Used to be confident and bold in the work mask. Then outside work when unmasked I was shy and timid.

Yes, I can have that kind of voice. I've spent years talking on the phone for work in...customer service. Countless times people have told me that I could be on in radio. That's not how I always talk though. When at home with my family, I talk very differently than anywhere else; I talk much slower.

No, my voice, for a long time, sounded like the voice of a person much younger than my actual age. I think my voice has become more normal-sounding.

My Mum (And I actually catch myself doing this) will automatically copy the accent and mannerisms of the person she is speaking to. She can't help it. It just happens. She never tries to.