How controversy over ScotRail's 'horrible' AI train announcer just took a surreal twist

Some passengers aren’t particularly fond of ScotRail’s AI announcer ‘Iona’ – and neither is the actor whose voice was used

Imagine you’re getting on a train when suddenly a voice starts talking over a tannoy. It is saying things you’ve never said before but it is, unmistakably, your voice.

Scottish voice actor Gayanne Potter has now revealed that she discovered “ScotRail’s new horrible AI train announcer ‘Iona’ is in fact using my voice data – and nobody told me”. There’s even a fake AI image of what the fictional ‘Iona’ is supposed to look like.

Gayanne Potter has called for ScotRail to use a human voice instead of an AI one | Mark Mainz

Potter did some work for a Swedish company called ReadSpeaker some years ago, but says she thought this was to “provide text-to-speech recordings” for visually impaired people. She has been trying to persuade the firm to stop using her voice, even offering to return her original fee, but to no avail, and she’s now talking to lawyers. ReadSpeaker insists it has a contract “regarding the use of her voice”.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this case, it’s starting to feel like the growing AI revolution is ushering a decidedly strange, possibly dystopian world in which the difference between real, unreal and downright surreal is almost impossible to tell.