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A former NPR radio host has sued Google and its parent company Alphabet, alleging that the tech giant used his voice for its NotebookLM AI product.
David Greene, former host of NPR’s Morning Edition and current host of KCRW’s Left, Right & Center, filed the lawsuit in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County. “Google used Mr. Greene’s voice without authorization and then used those stolen copies to develop, train, and refine its AI broadcasting product, NotebookLM,” the lawsuit alleges.
NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that generates insights from data that you input into the system. Google last year introduced audio and video overviews for NotebookLM. In the case of the former, someone using the software can generate an AI podcast based on information in a file you upload. Greene says that others began informing him after the fall 2024 addition of the feature that one of the voices in those podcasts sounded a lot like his.
“These allegations are baseless,” a Google spokesperson told CNET. “The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired.” Google has not identified the voice actor that it says it paid for work on NotebookLM.
According to the lawsuit, Greene said he hired an independent forensic software company that specializes in voice recognition to compare his voice to the one in question on NotebookLM.
“The company conducted a thorough analysis of the voice similarity between Mr. Greene’s voice and the voice used in NotebookLM,” the lawsuit says. “The tests indicated a confidence rating of 53%-60% (on a -100% to 100% scale) that Mr. Greene’s voice was used to train the software driving NotebookLM.”
The voices of professional voice actors or celebrities have been the subject of previous complaints, lawsuits and licensing deals. In 2024, Scarlett Johansson raised concerns about an OpenAI voice that sounded similar to hers. The company removed the sound-alike. Last year, ElevenLabs struck a deal to license voices from celebrities including Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine.
