Artist giving voice to Waze sues Apple for using it on Siri

Artist giving voice to Waze sues Apple for using it on Siri

Did you think Apple would close the year without another case? If so, it is better to reconsider. This time, the radio broadcaster and vocal artist decided to take the company to court Galit Gura-Eini, who filed a lawsuit against the Cupertino giant for using his voice in Hebrew version of Siri without your permission.

Galit Gura-EiniGalit Gura-Eini with device displaying the Waze app.

According to the report released by the CTech, the Israeli broadcaster claimed to have a specific problem with the type of content her voice is «persuaded to say as Apple’s digital voice assistant». Gura-Eini, who is also responsible for providing the local voice for the Waze, asked for $ 66,000 in the lawsuit against Apple filed this week in a district court in Tel Aviv (Israel).

As with many of Siri’s voices in different regions of the world, the voice of the vocal artist was recorded generically even before Apple introduced its own virtual assistant in 2010. In the case of Gura-Eini, her voice was recorded in 2007 by a Nuance Communications subsidiary specializing in artificial intelligence and speech recognition.

The broadcaster, however, gave Nuance permission only to use the recordings for “legitimate needs”; after all, we are talking about 2007, when the idea of ​​a digital assistant was minimal. She said she only learned that Apple used her voice for the Hebrew version of Siri when it was released in that language in 2016.

In the process, Gura-Eini suggested that his voice is “widely identified and associated” with his own personality and, given the dissatisfaction with the content that people ask Siri to reproduce, this is tantamount to “turning it into a vehicle for speech improper and humiliating ”. She also admitted that she contacted Apple earlier this year, asking for her voice to be removed from Siri, but Apple denied it.

Apple, for its part, said it did nothing wrong. The Apple lawyer said the recordings were obtained legally and that Gura-Eini «does not have legal ownership over them». In addition, the company pointed out that her voice at Siri is nothing more than “syllables joined by an algorithm”.

via Cult of Mac