They approached Johansson and she said no. They found another voice actor who sounds slightly similar and paid her instead.
The movie industry does this all the time.
Johansson is probably suing them so they're forced to remove the Sky voice while the lawsuit is happening.
Nothing here is shitty.
These rights should have their limits but also serve a very real purpose in that such people should have some protection from others pretending to be/sound like/etc them in porn, ads for objectionable products/organizations/etc, and all the above without compensation.
- they used Johannson's actual voice in training the text to speech model
or
- a court finds that they violated Johannson's likeness.
From hearing the demo videos, I don't think the voice sounded that similar to Johannson.
But hiring another actor to replicate someone you refused your offer is not illegal and is done all the time by hollywood.
Probably this could indeed make them "win" (or not lose rather) in a legal battle/courts.
But doing so will easily make them lose in the PR/public sense, as it's a shitty thing to do to another person, and hopefully not everyone is completely emotionless.
If an actor is saying no and you have a certain creative vision then what do you do?
Johansson doesn't own the idea of a "flirty female AI voice".
That's exactly what was done when Jeffrey Weissman replaced Crispin Glover in Back to the Future Part II.