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Navigation app Waze has picked up a new celebrity voice, and this time around it’s Liam Neeson. There don’t seem to be any in-app riffs on his famous speech from Taken, arguably the most iconic moment of his career, but Waze could not resist partially quoting the speech in its press release touting the new voice. The voice talent is on loan as part of a tie-in with Neeson’s newest movie, Commuter, which will be hitting theaters across the United States on January 12, 2018. Two days after Neeson goes through his own commute, his voice will no longer be available to narrate yours, so if you want to have your morning trip turned into a tense psychological action thriller, your best bet is to head to the Play Store now if you don’t already have Waze on your phone.
Just like with all of the past celebrity voices that have graced the app, Waze users wanting Neeson to voice their commute can make that decision from the Voice directions menu in the app. The usual options stick around, but celebrity voices come and go in short order, rarely lasting more than a month. The feature will see Neeson narrating your Waze trips in the same way as any other Waze voice, using the same prerecorded lines.
Celebrity voices have been an integral part of Waze’s appeal for a long time, with big names and iconic, popular voices like Morgan Freeman and Arnold Schwarzenegger populating the ticket at one time or another. It’s worth noting that there’s a slightly hacky way to keep celebrity voices around after their expiry date; you can simply download the voice file recordings from an external source or record them yourself to an outside file, then use Waze’s built-in voice recording feature to create a custom voice profile that’s actually the voice of the celebrity in question. Through the use of soundboards and other means, this can also get celebrities who have never loaned their voice to Waze into your app, as well as synthesized, pre-recorded, or otherwise flexible voices like Google Assistant, Microsoft Sam, and Hatsune Miku. The feature is meant to allow users to self-narrate their commutes.