Morgan Freeman & Star Trek’s LCARS Get New Tech Voice Roles

It’s a great week for celebrity voices. Morgan Freeman has finally come to GPS voice navigation while Star Trek’s LCARS could appear in both the new show and on mobile devices.

Freeman’s voice is now available as an option for the spoken directions in Google-owned navigation app Waze. Without explanation, the controls may be a little confusing as he delivers the directions as if you were the US president. That’s because it’s a tie-in with the movie London Has Fallen where he plays the vice-president.

Meanwhile the official Gene Roddenberry Twitter account has revealed that his late wife Majel Barrett could appear in next year’s Star Trek: Discovery despite having died in 2008. As well as playing a few one-off roles in the Star Trek universe, she provided the voice of the show’s Library Computer Access/Retrieval System.

@Roddenberry says there’s enough recorded audio of Barrett’s tape to create a phonetic library that can be used to create new speech to revive the LCARS role. He’s also exploring the idea of Barrett’s voice being used for virtual assistants along the lines of Siri.