Sadly just available for a limited time and only accessible by users in the US, singer John Legend is going to be the voice of Google Assistant.

“Just say, ‘Hey Google, talk like a Legend,’ and you’ll hear John’s voice for select content when you ask the Assistant for jokes or for answers to questions like ‘What’s the temperature outside?’ or ‘Why is the sky blue?’” writes Manuel Bronstein, VP of product for Google Assistant, in a blog post about the initiative. “You’ll also hear John’s voice when you ask about his personality and affinity for music.”

Legend appears in a promo video reading the weather report and introducing one of his favourite songs (“Happy birthday to the person whose birthday it is…”). It is all delightfully tongue-in-cheek.

Google says that cameo voices on Assistant are one of the top user requests the company gets and we can only presume Legend is the first of many who will have their voices replicated for the technology.

This has been a long time coming as Legend originally made a cameo as the voice of Assistant back in May 2018 in a demo of the technology at the Google I/O conference.

It is both a marketing gimmick for Legend but also a way for Google to show off the WaveNet technology that it describes as “a new deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms that is capable of producing better and more realistic-sounding speech than existing techniques”. In brief, it allows a user to input their own voice and work through a list of key sounds which WaveNet can then turn into natural-sounding speech.

Dystopians will naturally shudder at the thought that anyone’s speech can be replicated so easily while voice actors and impressionists will be worrying about their future career prospects.