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- Scotland’s rail provider has changed the human educate announcement voice with an AI one on some routes
- The voice era is powered by way of Swedish corporate ReadSpeaker
- A voice actor claims the corporate is the usage of her voice with out permission, however ReadSpeaker says it has “comprehensively addressed” those lawsuits
If you are living in Scotland, or have ever visited our stunning nation and travelled on a educate, you can have most probably heard the homely lilt of the feminine voice pronouncing station stops and different knowledge.
However, educate corporate Scotrail has now changed the enduring voice with AI, sparking uproar amongst commuters – and claims from a voice actor that Scotrail has stolen her voice.
The new AI announcer is named Iona, and the robot voice has changed the human one that almost all of Scots have grown up with. Iona is lately rolling out on routes throughout Scotland, however thus far has been met with hostility.
HATE the brand new ScotRail AI announcer voice. It feels like a Scottish model of HAL from Space Odyssey!May 17, 2025
The AI voices makes use of text-to-speech era that permits educate conductors to enter bulletins which are then spoken around the public cope with device by way of Iona.
That’s my voice!
Following the preliminary backlash towards the AI voice rollout, Scotrail spoke back on X, pronouncing, “Give it time and it’s going to develop on you.“
One individual the voice is not rising on is voice actor Gayanne Potter, who is accused the Scottish Government-owned educate corporate of stealing her voice. Potter is a voice actor who did some paintings for the Swedish corporate ReadSpeaker in 2021.
ReadSpeaker is the corporate in the back of Iona, and on the time, Ms Potter used to be informed her voice paintings would handiest be used for accessibility and e-learning device.
After a chum despatched her a hyperlink to ReadSpeaker’s web site, Potter known the voice, noticing similarities between her personal tone and that of Iona, a character that Scotrail is advertising as a red-haired Scottish lady, with a picture that is additionally – in fact – AI-generated.
Ms Potter informed the BBC, “It is my voice – I’m absolutely certain it’s my voice.” Potter has been in a dispute with ReadSpeaker over the use her voice for two years.
In response to the complaints, ReadSpeaker told the BBC, “ReadSpeaker is acutely aware of Ms Potter’s issues, and has comprehensively addressed those with Ms Potter’s prison consultant a number of occasions prior to now.”
In the BBC report you can listen to a comparison between Ms Potter and Iona. There’s no denying the voices are very similar, although the real issue here is the protection of workers in the creative industry, and awareness of how they sign over their rights when producing work.
Potter said, “It’s onerous sufficient for other people within the inventive business to maintain careers, however to be competing with a robot model of your self simply provides insult to harm.”
This is just the latest controversy in the debate over who owns what in the rapidly evolving world of AI. Potter says she didn’t know at the time that her voice would be used to train a robotic one heard across Scotland. Now, she can’t escape her ‘own’ AI voice.
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