Dateline NBC’s Keith Morrison has one of those utterly recognizable voices that you simply can’t mistake or fail to recognize when you hear it, and now he can guide your journeys with Waze. Just like fellow golden voice owners Morgan Freeman and Shaquille O’Neal, getting Keith Morrison to tell you how and where you should be driving is as simple as heading into the settings menu in the Waze app, tapping on “Voice directions”, then giving Keith’s name a tap. Once you’ve done that, Keith will guide you around the app and to and from your destinations. Shaq and Morgan Freeman’s voices have both disappeared from the app, and Waze has not announced how long Keith’s voice will be around, so Dateline NBC fans are encouraged to give it a try while they can.
To show off the new voice, NBC’s Josh Mankiewicz, also of dateline, took the app for a spin in a video the company posted to YouTube. Naturally, while lamenting about the lack of indirectly Keith-free zones in his life, Mankiewicz was joined on his ride by the man himself. When asked to leave the car, Keith did so, but hinted to viewers that he knew his voice wouldn’t. While the whimsical commercial didn’t exactly match the serious tone of Dateline NBC’s reporting, it did a great job of showing Keith Morrison’s Waze voice in action as it guided Mankiewicz around potholes and informed him of other hazards ahead, one of the features that gives the crowdsourced Waze app a leg up on Google Maps.
As stated above, Keith Morrison is not the first golden-voiced celebrity to be featured on Waze, and likely won’t be the last. The app first started onboarding celebrity voices back in 2013 with Kevin Hart, and never looked back. From there, the list has included the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elvis Presley, Neil Patrick Harris, and Jay Leno. The non-celebrity voices run the gamut of languages, and contain a wide range of options, including a boy band that will sing your directions to you. While celebrity voices come and go, users that download a voice pack can keep it as long as they like, so long as they get in before it’s gone, and voice packs can be found on the web and installed by simply overwriting some default Waze files in the app’s folder.