Ali landed in Los Angeles around 2000, just before big-name actors began moving into television, and the timing was good to her. Pilots, guest stars and recurring roles came quickly, and by the time she shot "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer she had a pilot of her own in the works. Around then, a friend called to say a voice agency had an opening, and Ali, who had no idea what voiceover was, checked it out anyway. She was asked to come back with a reel, which was very expensive at the time to make, so instead in the moment she asked to simply read copy from their recycling box full of scripts. She told the room, "I'm either good or I'm not." Her bold choice paid off and she was signed a week later. This began a career she never expected to be known for, or to fall in love with. In the booth, she drew on everything that came before it: music training, theater, the pavement-pounding, the business sense learned waiting tables, and one very specific piece of advice she had learned back in New York from a commercial agent. An agent who had sent her home to change out of the skirt and dolled-up persona she came in wearing, and to come back as herself. So Ali did just that and returned in overalls and a tank top, hair up in a ponytail, sitting cross legged across from the agent. The agent still didn't sign her but the important lesson held, and it is a core principle of her craft that has brought some of her most iconic characters to life. A principle to make bold choices and bring yourself to the role. The same principle that led her to find the voice of Lightning in Final Fantasy XIII, lowering her voice against what the studio expected while still letting the Japanese reference performance guide her strength and her sensitivities. It is how she built Liara T'Soni in Mass Effect from a simple paragraph and an early blue wireframe model, discovering Liara's inquisitiveness after tilting her head in the booth like one of her dogs. It is how she created Scout Harding's bashfulness in Dragon Age: Inquisition simply by putting her hands in her pockets and nervously drawing pictures with her toes in the sand. Characters that have inspired millions and that have helped define some of the video game industry's most legendary titles.

Nowadays, Ali is bringing even more life to her characters by jumping into the volume and doing performance capture, a combination of the career she fell in love with and the craft of theater that she built her life around. Her first opportunity was returning as Scout Harding in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a character she had defined with her voice but could now define head to toe and where the hands in her pockets and the toe drawing in the sand were actually there for players to see. When she's not in the booth or the volume, she continues to meet her fans to foster the connections they have with her characters and allow them to grow even deeper. For Ali, the convention table is where the work comes back to her. Fans arrive already tearing up, telling her they played through military service, through an illness in the family, through a lockdown when a headset and a conversation were the only relationship available to them. Although she may be seen as the voice and face of these characters, Ali will always give the credit to BioWare and the creatives who built them. What she holds on to is what those conversations with the fans prove: that entertainment matters. That these games matter. That performance matters. It is something she spent the early years of her career downplaying when strangers asked what she did and instead of telling them the truth she told them, "I'm a librarian." Performing in games is what has allowed her to finally say "I'm an actor" and proudly stand by it.