5 Questions with Teresa Lim

A voice actor for the past two decades, Teresa Lim voices commercial and corporate brands across all platforms, and has won LearnX Asia Pacific’s Best Audio. She was the female channel voice for Cartoon Network and Boomerang TV for seven years, and became the female network voice for Fox Sports Australia in 2021 for Netball Australia. As the vice-president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, Teresa gave evidence last year at the Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence. As cloning technology advances, the AAVA is seeking legislative safeguards.

Q1. What has been your best career move?

The idea actually came from my mum. I graduated with a journalism degree from UQ in 2003 and ended up working in newsrooms. The hours were brutal – like 4am until midday – so it was really hard to think about having a family. Mum had read this book by an overseas entrepreneur and said, “You could build a home studio and do voiceovers from home.” I thought, “That sounds crazy”, but with the help of friends I made a demo and ended up becoming very successful. I freelanced that way for years until I was picked up by a Sydney voiceover agency as the first Asian talent on their books – because Mandarin is my first language. My career just skyrocketed from there. It was a brave, scary move to step away from a stable news career into something that wasn’t common. It was quite revolutionary back then.

Q2. Has the situation improved in your industry for women of colour?

At the end of my degree, my TV lecturer said, “You need to go to SBS because that's the only place they’ll accept Asian talent on screen in Australia.” I said, “Then I'm going to work in radio – because on radio you can't tell I’m Asian by the way I sound, and it’s non-discriminatory.” The lack of diversity on TV was a big issue in the 2000s. And then, on August 1 in 2017, Screen Australia signed the diversity charter. All of a sudden, I was pushed onscreen to do everything and anything. I played the Asian wife of a white man so many times. In one Vodafone ad in 2017, it was me and a Caucasian male with a fully Chinese daughter and fully Japanese son. They weren't even mixed-race! I've also had a white daughter with just brunette hair and bangs – that’s how they identified her as Asian. In voiceovers as well, I often get asked to do an Asian accent and I have to ask which region? I have a generic Asian face, so I get cast as Japanese/Thai/Malaysian. It’s more tokenistic than authentic.

Q3. What is the best advice you've been given?

My mum is an engineer, and that was so rare in ’70s Malaysia. She left a small island called Penang and went to Birmingham to study engineering and met my father, who’s from Brunei. They migrated to Australia, became builders, and now they're property developers. She's a brave woman who's tried new things and she told me once that solutions can be found from exploring new and different angles – so if something doesn't work the first time, try again another way. It’s a growth mentality. That's really shaped my work ethic, because now I'm involved in a massive AI fight against voice cloning with the Australian Association of Voice Actors. We have to be so creative in finding new approaches to government, to industry regulators, to everything. I spoke in Parliament last year in support of protecting the voice-acting industry from generative AI, to stop them stealing our voices and our livelihoods.

Q4. If you had your time over, what would you do differently?

Two things. When I started out as an Asian in the media industry, I was really timid, not confident in my skills, and not sure what the opportunities were. If I had my time again, I’d be more vocal about media diversity and in conversations about inclusion. It was such a smaller, limited market, I didn't know how I would fit into the industry. The second thing is, I would have been prepared for the AI-cloning fight and sought preventative measures legislatively earlier. Now we're fighting to contain it. Something like Google’s recently launched AI video generator, Veo 3, is phenomenal – it’s going to revolutionise video-making, and that puts a lot of creatives’ jobs in question. We've got to scale ethics with tech. We can't be relying on ethics we had two years ago, when this tech wasn't here. Government is very slow to legislate. We've got to act now.

Q5. What do you think the media industry will look like in 10 years’ time?

AI is going to be our biggest discussion in the next few years: how that looks, what's broadcast on air, what's disclosed as AI, how it's used to clone voices. Newsrooms will be the next important thing that we look at, so that human voices and likeness are protected, and that truth and full disclosure is out there. I've got three teenagers, and on social media, AI is just looking so real. For me, the next 10 years is going to be the advent of AI broadcasting. We need to look at how that's going to roll out. Honestly, it’s going to change everything.

Interview by Susan Horsburgh