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Royal Mail confirms the voice in its Christmas advert was made with AI
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Royal Mail admits the narration in its 2025 holiday campaign came from artificial intelligence, after complaints from Lucy Wynne, who heard her late father, the narrator Paul Vaughan, in it. Royal Mail maintains that outside partners built it from written instructions, with no intent to copy anyone. Vincent Hughes, a forensic speech expert, finds a strong phonetic likeness between the two voices.
Royal Mail, the British postal service, has acknowledged that the voiceover in its Christmas 2025 advert was generated with artificial intelligence. It did so after Lucy Wynne, daughter of BBC narrator Paul Vaughan, who died in 2014 aged 89, said she recognised her father's voice in the advert. The Express reported it on Friday 9 October, in an article carried by AOL.
Paul Vaughan was the voice of the BBC science programme Horizon, of the Paddington audiobooks and of Tesco's "Every Little Helps" advertising slogan. His daughter says no one in the family gave permission for his voice to be used and that, when she wrote to Royal Mail, the company gave her no answer. It admitted it after the campaign group "Save Our Voices Now" stepped in, a group calling for every citizen to have legal ownership of their own voice. "If my dad had been alive, he would have been livid," his daughter said.
A Royal Mail spokesperson told the Express, as reported by AOL, that the advert was produced by external partners, featured real actors and that the voiceover was AI-generated. The company added that it was advised the voice was created using prompts and was not designed to replicate any specific individual, and that checks by the production partners did not identify any resemblance concerns. Royal Mail has never confirmed that it used Vaughan's voice to generate the one in the advert.
The group consulted experts. Vincent Hughes, Professor of Forensic Speech Science, sees "considerable phonetic similarity" between the voice in the advert and Paul Vaughan's, both in its sounds and in overall voice quality. Voice perception researcher Nadine Lavan says the AI voice in the advert "sounds like Paul".
According to the group, Royal Mail had the voice made by Fameplay, a Prague company that works through ElevenLabs, and ElevenLabs has put Vaughan on its list of voices that cannot be used. According to Deadline, in a report carried by Cybernews, ElevenLabs declined to comment. There is no UK law that stops a voice being cloned without consent, before or after death.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
The case shows a risk that does not depend on copying anyone on purpose: a synthetic voice built from text prompts can end up sounding like a specific person, and the brand that signs the advert answers to the public even if someone else produced it. Royal Mail's defence rests on what its suppliers told it, and that has not spared it the damage to its image. Without a British law protecting the voice, the pressure comes from families, experts and actors' groups. Anyone commissioning AI-generated voiceovers has reason to ask in writing where the voice comes from, what resemblance checks were done and who is responsible if someone recognises it.
Source: AOL · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
