Well done to Lidl for taking a stand for humanity amid the rise of the robots
The new voice of Lidl’s self-service tills will be a human, not an AI-generated facsimile
With AI voices increasingly difficult to tell apart from the people they mimic, one might think a big supermarket chain would enthusiastically embrace the zeitgeist. Instead, in a marvellous victory for humanity, the (admittedly recorded) voice of Lidl’s self-service checkouts in Scotland is to be one Alan Macdonald, 46, from Oban.
He was picked as the winner of a competition that attracted entries from about 5,000 people. “They were looking for a predominantly Scottish accent obviously, but upbeat and friendly is the best way to do it,” Macdonald, who worked for Oban FM, said. “We’ve always been told the Oban accent is along those lines. You can hear a smile through the microphone, that’s something I learned on the radio.”
He added that while hearing his own voice at the local Lidl would be like an “out of body experience” and “odd times ten”, he was “very proud to do it, very happy to do it”.
Lidl too should be proud for taking the trouble to do something quite simple but also meaningful and rather touching. Humanity 1, Robots 0.
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