Judi Dench

Dame Judi Dench (born 1934) is one of the most decorated actresses in British history — an Academy Award winner for “Shakespeare in Love,” a seven-time Oscar nominee, and the steely M of the James Bond franchise for seventeen years. Her voice, instantly recognizable across generations, has become one of her most valuable instruments as advancing macular degeneration has made conventional film work difficult.

Lending her voice to Meta AI

At the Meta Connect conference on September 25, 2024, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta AI — the assistant built into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, with roughly 400 million users — could now speak its answers aloud in a selection of celebrity voices. Dench was among the first five, alongside John Cena, Kristen Bell, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported that Meta paid the celebrities millions of dollars each for multi-year rights to their voices.

Dench herself has not spoken publicly about the deal, but the licensing action is unambiguous: at a moment when much of Hollywood treats voice cloning as an existential threat, one of the most respected actresses alive chose to be paid to have an AI replicate her voice. The deal landed barely a year after Scarlett Johansson publicly accused OpenAI of imitating her voice without consent — a contrast the press coverage noted, since Meta’s arrangement was exactly the consent-and-compensation model performers’ unions have demanded.

Dench has said she has no intention of retiring even as her eyesight fails — telling Louis Theroux in 2022 that she can no longer read scripts and relies on friends to teach her lines. Voice licensing extends a career built on one of cinema’s great voices into a medium that does not require her to see a camera at all.