The daughter of late BBC broadcaster and Paddington audiobook narrator Paul Vaughan has accused Royal Mail of using artificial intelligence to recreate her father’s voice in a Christmas advert without permission.
Lucy Wynne said she recognised her father’s voice in the postal service’s 2025 festive campaign while watching television at home in November. Vaughan died in 2014.
The advert, which aired on ITV, features a male narrator saying, “Royal Mail, it’s so much more than just a card.” Wynne said hearing the voice brought back memories of her father and left her concerned that his voice had been recreated using AI.
“It’s outrageous,” Wynne said, criticising the company for failing to establish whose voice the advert resembled.
Vaughan was known for narrating the BBC science series Horizon, Radio 4’s arts programme Kaleidoscope and the nuclear war drama Threads. He also narrated Paddington audiobooks.
Royal Mail confirmed to Deadline that artificial intelligence was used to produce the advert’s voiceover. A company spokesperson said the voice was “not designed to replicate any specific individual.”
The campaign was overseen by advertising agency Darwin & the Machines, which worked with production company Untold Studios. The voiceover was subcontracted to Fameplay, an AI specialist based in the Czech Republic.
A source who worked on the advert told Deadline that Fameplay representative Juraj Felix had advocated using AI for the narration, despite concerns from the production team about using the technology for a longstanding British institution.
Royal Mail said the advert’s producers had carried out checks and found no concerns about the voice resembling a specific person.
However, Wynne said she was convinced by the similarity to her father’s voice, particularly its distinctive delivery. “There’s an inflection in his voice that no one else has.”
Dr Nadine Lavan, a voice psychology expert at Queen Mary University of London, said research showed that family members can be particularly good at recognising the voices of people close to them.
“With Wynne recognizing the voice from the advert as being Paul, we can conclude the voice is very similar,” Lavan said.
Vincent Hughes, a professor of forensic speech science at the University of York, also found considerable similarities between the advert’s narration and recordings of Vaughan.
His analysis was limited by the short length of the advert’s voiceover but identified similarities in pronunciation and overall voice quality, also known as timbre.
Deadline also compared the advert with other recordings of Vaughan using three open-source AI analysis tools. All three identified similarities suggesting the recordings could feature the same speaker.
Fameplay said it did not use any reference to Vaughan in the prompts used to generate the voice. The company licensed its AI technology from ElevenLabs, an AI audio company.
ElevenLabs told Deadline that the narration was not a direct clone of Vaughan’s voice. The company declined to comment on whether its AI model might have been trained on material featuring his voice.
Daughter Calls For Human Voice Artists-Wynne said her father would have opposed the use of AI in a way that could take work away from professional voice artists. She argued that Royal Mail should have hired a human narrator instead. “Pay the money and get somebody in to do the job.”
Wynne also said she had not received an apology from Royal Mail after raising her concerns. The company told Deadline: “We understand the concerns raised and have taken them seriously.”
ElevenLabs has since added Vaughan to its No Go Voices list, preventing his voice from being directly cloned on its platform in the future.
Peter Caulfield, an actor who founded the Save Our Voices Now campaign, said the case highlighted the risks of using AI-generated voices without thorough checks. “Using AI in this way, whether inadvertently or not, without thorough checks, can result in a company stealing a voice from the grave and causing great upset to the family involved.”
The case has renewed questions about consent, accountability and the use of AI to reproduce voices, particularly when the people whose voices may be replicated are no longer alive to give permission.
Erizia Rubyjeana
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