Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
TikTok is being sued by a voice actor who claims to be behind its viral text-to-speech feature, but says she never authorized TikTok — or just about anyone, really — to use her voice this way. The lawsuit, filed last week, says Bev Standing’s voice has been used to repeat “foul and offensive language” and that TikTok’s use will cause her “irreparable harm.”
It’s unclear how Standing’s voice could have come to be used by TikTok, at least by the lawsuit’s telling. Standing says that she did voice recordings for a text-to-speech feature “several years ago” for a group called the Institute of Acoustics (IOA). Those recordings were meant to be used for translations of Chinese texts as part of a contract with an unnamed Chinese company, the…
