To ward off potential legal headaches

Personal voice, a new capability within Microsoft’s custom neural voice service, can replicate a user’s voice in a few seconds provided a one-minute speech sample as an audio prompt.

Microsoft pitches it as a way to create personalized voice assistants, dub content into different languages and generate bespoke narrations for stories, audio books and podcasts.

To ward off potential legal headaches, Microsoft’s requiring that users give “explicit consent” in the form of a recorded statement before a customer can use personal voice to synthesize their voices.