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The woman who voices TikTok’s text-to-speech feature has been identified and, get this, she is a radio show host at a Canadian radio station.
She’s one half of the weekday morning drive show called Scott & Kat on 91.5 The Beat in Kitchener-Waterloo. They also have an aftershow podcast which is uncensored and mainly features content not heard on-air.
Her full name is Kat Callaghan and she became the text-to-speech voice for TikTok after the previous voice actor, Beverly Standing, sued TikTok’s parent company ByteDance for using her voice to narrate videos without her permission.
So how do we know that Kat Callaghan is the infamous text-to-speech voice we hear constantly on TikTok? Because she posted a TikTok telling everyone, of course. She’s also on Twitter.
“For a long time I didn’t say a word. But … yes it’s me and yes I have an ongoing awesome relationship with the folks at TikTok. The coolest part for me is watching the creativity & awesome content that people are putting out there using my voice. (Also oddly enough this is my first TikTok),” she caption the video, which has now been viewed almost 29 million times.
@voiceofkat For a long time I didn’t say a word. But … yes it’s me and yes I have an ongoing awesome relationship with the folks at TikTok. 🎉 The coolest part for me is watching the creativity & awesome content that people are putting out there using my voice. (Also oddly enough this is my first TikTok)
Hearing the TikTok text-to-speech voice come out of an actual woman’s mouth in a TikTok is so meta
Kat followed that TikTok video with another one answering some the questions she gets asked.
@voiceofkat Let’s see if this does it.
Is your brain having a hard time computing that voice coming out of an actual person’s mouth? You’re not alone.
“y is this so life changing?” one viewer commented.
“Imagine her scrolling thru tiktok and just hearing her own voice over and over,” another wrote.
“How did you time your mouth exactly with the tiktok voice?! Phenomenal lip-sync!” commented another viewer.
In her third TikTok video she explained why she says “LOL” the way she does. You know what I mean.
@voiceofkat Yes I know what LOL is. #LOL #tiktok #texttospeech #tts #letsfixthis ♬ original sound – Kat