Meet Q, a Genderless Voice
genderlessvoice.com
genderlessvoice.com
They did a "great" job... for me, it's exactly ambiguous between a high-pitched male voice and a deep-pitched female voice. It's like the old "is it a vase or two faces?" illusion, or "which way is the ballerina spinning?" It keeps flipping in my brain.
But for the same reason, I would never choose it because it sounds so out-of-the-ordinary, an extreme outlier for human voices. When a computerized voice is speaking, I want it to sound "natural" (e.g. common, unexceptional) so that I'm paying attention to the message, not the voice.
Unfortunately a single "gender-neutral" voice turns out to sound quite uncommon, very exceptional. I only know a couple of people who sound like that, out of 1000's. I applaud the intention, but unfortunately I don't think it works in the end.
Regularly or randomly alternating between "average" female and male voices feels like perhaps a better practical solution, matching the two "humps" in the bimodal distribution of actual voice frequencies. [1]
I transitioned from male to female some years back and trained my voice from a deep, masculine voice to one solidly in the female range. Pitch is only one aspect of how we gender speech, and I think that’s why it feels off to you.
I would say this voice uses pretty male-coded speech patterns with a higher pitch than you’d normally hear a man speak in. The pattern of clear starts and stops between words and limited range of pitch used sounds “male” to my ears.
This sounds like an exaggerated stereotype of how men speak. Interestingly, the stereotype is different for men from Southern European countries who are said to speak in a sing-songy voice with vowels flowing together between words like vocal ligatures.
For example, this stereotype is used for satirical effect in the following strip:
Though I do agree that gender norms are largely cultural — but it doesn’t change the fact that a Spanish man sounds “gay” to most Americans.
In that case, talking of a certain vocal style as being masculine or feminine, without a cultural qualifier, is meaningless. You should clarify that "this is how men speak in the US" or some such.
I don't know if I'd take a Netflix documentary as evidence that a stereotype is accurate.
Edit: also your edit is just plain offensive. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Also, I discern in your comment the start of a certain aggression in such conversations that I find, frankly, disturbing. There is absolutely nothing in my comment that is addressed to you, personally, yet yours is becoming personal. To protect myself from what this can lead to, I will not contribute to this discussion any longer.
Having an AI-voice sound artificial could be an advantage in certain situation but I doubt that was the goal here.
Dragging it all the way down left sounds like a woman with a deep voice.
My take on the voice? Sorry, to me it's an effeminate male voice. I hear a british woman overlaid with Fez from that seventies show. In fact I was on a flight yesterday with a very obvious gay male flight attendant who sounded very similar to this. Think man's voice with a little helium in the air.
I’m not a fan of these kind of characterizations. I can think of two things that make someone obviously gay: (1) they tell you, or (2) you see that person engaging in homosexual conduct.
Nearly anything else is probably a prejudicial stereotype.
Whether you are a fan of those characterizations or not. It's real.
I am not who you are answering to. I don't think purple-dragon is being irrational here, you initial comments were easy to misunderstand and negative stereotypes of homosexuality are still a problem today. Assuming goodwill I actually think that your comment had nothing wrong in it (assuming you do not actually think that that flight attendant "must" be gay or that all gay behave like that), still purple-dragon is not wrong either in reading it as a negative depiction. Internet conversations are just hard...
There is a publicly recognized stereotype of gay man (essentially Jack from Will & Grace) which is not a faithful depiction of many homosexual men, I find wrong to assume that it is indeed faithful (all gay man are like that and vice versa). What I think will be a solution to this prejudice is not negating the stereotype but divorcing it from the actual sexual orientation of the individual.
I believe that many heterosexual males would be more comfortable with a more effeminate personality and that an homosexual can be at any point of the "virility" spectrum, still the spectrum exist.
It is not controversial to say that an obvious metalhead is indeed a metalhead.
Also I would like to point out that "(2) you see that person engaging in homosexual conduct" is not that much of a silver bullet here, as bisexual and trans people exist too :)
Also sometime it is not hard to know more someone that they know themselves, I had a couple friends that were known to be gay before they knew themselves. And also "a very obvious gay male" does not mean homosexual to many people, in the last years society and the internet became much more mature in distinguishing masculine/effeminate stereotypes from actual sexual orientations. I have no idea of what went through GP minds, but I believe that being able to separate the "very obvious gay" from a description of a sexual orientation into a personality trait can be very beneficial for society in the long term.
Here is an extreme example to prove this. I can say that I am a chair, and I can argue this until I'm blue in the face, but that won't change the fact that others will think that I am a human, not a chair. More relevant to the conversation, let's say I am a man that only has relationships with other men. I can call myself straight all I want, but if I tell other people about my behavior, they will categorize that behavior by the behavior(homosexual), thus it will not always align with the categorization that I apply to myself(straight). Okay or not, it is human nature to behave this way.
I know this is quite a bit, but the main point I'm trying to make is that there is nuance in this conversation. Categorizations aren't always evil(though they can be), and are important social signals in our society.
As for deciding “what that makes me”, I was trying to obliquely save room for the case another poster brought up, namely being gay or bisexual.
I thought the idea is to make gender a flexible thing, for example you can experiment with being a female or whatever gender profile, based on whatever you feel comfortable with.
Not to reduce the worlds gender representations (in business, culture, etc) into a homogeneous middle ground? Expanding what's possible in terms of personal expression rather than (further) restricting it. So I'm very confused why this exists other than as an interesting technical project?
That's because it's the voice used to announce the titles of the episodes.
* Soundwave G1 voice compilation part I - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOu3hYXE_tM
It sounds a little bit like the voice of a moppet-type character from League of Legends that just huffed helium. Because it is so stylized you don't have the problem of a "perfect english gentleman" who pauses unnaturally, sometimes makes vowels like T-Pain, etc. that you have with more realistic voices.
It definitely comes across as female to me, but it is cartoony enough that it not so culturally coded as female -- so there is less of a sense of "female servicing" as there is with most voice assistants.
As it stands Q isn't genderless it's just gender non-conforming, which is a great alternative but I'd like to see some work into an actual "AI" voice rather than these voice assistants that try to imitate a human on the gender spectrum.
Please recognise that agender people are both human and genderless.
I have Waze speak as a British male, of course then he sounds like a stereotypical butler. It would be fun if I could set it to be Batman or HAL9000, but it would probably get old.
Aside from the motivations of the engineers (which are unclear and maybe even irrelevant), I think it's interesting technical work, including taking a stab at gender perception in speech patterns with a bold application.
The response to this AI voice demonstrates that a lot of people automatically hear any human(ish) voice as either female or male, one or the other. Similarly, people automatically recognise individuals as either female or male, one or the other. There's a very narrow band of presentation that won't be read automatically as one of those two options.
See how difficult it is to stop your brain from making automatic (possibly false) assumptions.
I just don't think things having gendered presentation is an issue. There are many languages with a female sun, male moon, female Earth, male oceans, and so on.
I don't think making assumptions that are true of the vast majority is necessarily wrong. What's wrong is reacting negatively and rejecting someone like yourself who doesn't wish to participate in the concept of gender, and that's cool, but communication based on gender is still efficient in most cases.
But isn't this happening only if some marxist is searching for this "problem"? I never considered it this way, until your comment.
It's like with the service OP is presenting... they are offering "solution" to made up problem.
Also, it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower. Even when I use the little drag thingy to pitch it as low as it will go, it still sounds female. I think most of us know pitch alone doesn't define voice, and that's clear from this.
Concentrate harder; it also sounds like a high pitched male.
Basically, for me, I flip flop between two genders. For me, there is no such thing as "genderless" voice, just "gender meta-stable" at best.
Another thing to consider is that adult female voices sound like boy's voices. In animation, boy characters are often acted by women (who aren't doing anything to change their voices).
So "gender neutral" easily has the interpretation of "between boy and man".
I think it sounds feminine in a couple senses, but male in others:
* The speaker speaks less from the chest and more from the throat
* In terms of enunciation, females tend to speak more clearly on sounds such as "t"s, which can be observed here.
* The voice sounds a little more male in that the ends of many words trend lower in pitch, but more female in that they "bottom out" very early in the descent and dip heavily into vocal fry.
* There is less range of tone, which is more characteristically male.
All this aside, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually multiple people. And I suppose the fact that we all disagree is evidence that they're doing something right. But I think most of us can agree it still sounds really wrong in some way.
I do perceive that there are abrupt transition in the voice as you move the so-called frequency slider; that could be due to abrupt changes in some parameters (like table lookup from a small table keyed to the frequency parameter or something).
They are close enough that you don't have to deal with the nightmare that is child talent.
That’s exactly what I hear. I’m not annoyed there is a market for such frivolous “woke” things, but I am annoyed it seems to be a mediocre attempt at it, it’s entirely female to me.
> It just sounds wrong, and I can't quite say why.
Maybe you're used to all people sounding male or female, so sounding like neither seems unfamiliar.
This is literally the whole problem. It's less that it's genderless in a robotic sense and more that it's a hybrid manipulation of actual voices. It just sounds wrong.
> Maybe you're used to all people sounding male or female, so sounding like neither seems unfamiliar.
Maybe so. We try to make our robots imitate humans, so of course they sound male or female. From what the website said, it might also be flipping between. But even if I am just used to it, so what? That's how I'd prefer my voice assistant to sound, if I ever got one. It's nobody's place to tell me what I should prefer, or say I need to get some creepy-sounding thing just to be woke.
To be quite frank, I think the goal is quite dehumanizing and I don't see how this helps, really.
If fighting racist stereotypes and prejudice is not achieved by means of avoiding the issue, why would it be any different with gender? Aren't simple respect for the other and fostering a culture of dignity the true goals?
Our brain's lock-in heuristics will always find a way to reinforce contrasts so that we can navigate the social world. If not gender, something else. What is needed is conscientiousness.
"Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type. Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir’s argument for equality does not fall into this trap. She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. Equality is not a synonym for sameness."
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
EDIT: from an artistic point, imagining what a sexless voice would sound like is an interesting project !
The guardian class is a selected breeding program where the best women and best men exclusive breed with each other, and any deformetives or lower quality personage got put in an “unspeakable and unseen place”.
When a child is born it get immediately taken from the parent into the hands of breeding pens to be trained into protecting and valuing the collective community above all else. The breeding pens is located in a certain section of the city and apart from the guardians in order to preserve equality and avoid personal possession from the parents.
The children, being pre-destined to participate in wars, should accompany and observe the guardians in battle as “spectators of war”. The involvement of the children in war serves as an opportunity for the Republic to instill a sense of patriotism to the state and admiration of the mighty Guardian class. They should help out and serve in the whole business of war.
To sum up: We are talking about Eugenics, genocide, removal of personhood and individualism, extermination of the concept of family, and creating child armies from the elite. This in a time period where nobility, monarchs, family and arranged marries was the focus point of high society, and the bulk of armies came from lower classes. It is about as subtle political commentary as Monty Python, which is why drawing conclusions such as "the price of women’s admission to the guardian class is that they must live like men" is supported by very loose ground. At best it is just show the cultural assumption of connecting war with masculinity, and at worst asserts that personhood and individualism is feminine.
Case and point, this is probably not perceived as "neutral" but either male or female, which kind of defeats the point.
As a side note, it doesn't feal natural at all, which is a big downside in term of acceptance.
In term of objectives, I consider the fact that the vast majority of vocal assistants have female voices more of a symptom rather than a cause, specially since they are not (yet) ubiquitously used in homes. It's more indicative of deeper issues in our societies regarding gender equality. On a very simple level, it's a basic reflection to the fact most human secretaries and assistants are women.
I would love to see as many voice assistants using male voices as ones using female voices. Jarvis in the "Iron Man" series kind of proves this can be done. Pushing for a neutral voice is more of a band-aid.
The discussion of which gender the voice assistant defaults to can basically be distilled down that people rating the experience of using the female version higher or lower than the male version in specific cultures. The question is why people of some cultures are biased towards a female voice, while other countries are biased towards a male voice.
We tend to think making computer interfaces appear human makes it easier for us, but I disagree. We have to remember we are not talking to a person, but a thing. It has no feelings, no real personality and no way to interpret what we're saying other than a series of orders.
And I should add that the onus of not perpetuating vicious stereotypes should fall on the shoulders of the users, not the designers. It seems to me that the idea of ever needing a genderless voice assumes that people are the passive victims of some evil ether that permeates their demeanour.
This is not to say that the project is not interesting - trying to capture the essences of human speech is quite a noble endeavour in itself, and it makes us more in touch with who we are.
You ever hear of upspeak/uptalking? Vocal fry? It's not so simple as just sex driven characteristics. (Although testosterone does impact the development of vocal chords.)
I wonder what difference is there between male and female voices besides pitch (excluding cultural differences in way of speaking)? If some are exclusively binary, using or not using it will obligatorily lead to one or the other, and if so, a totally "gender" neutral voice becomes impossible.
(I used gender enclosed in quotes because I'm only talking about the general biological differences between male and female voices, not elements such as way of speaking, choice of words, etc)
Maybe one approach could be mix aspects from both male and female voice.
Think about it; if you change the pitch of a note from 100 to 150 hz, that's should sound like someone is singing a perfect fifth interval. Nothing like that is heard here.
I love the idea behind this, although I don't necessarily agree that they have achieved their goal, but perhaps that says something about me more than it does about the service itself. To me, this still sounds like a female voice, just pitch-shifted.
But isn't that like people who assumed that violent games make people more violent (which was proven false in research)? To me this looks more like pushing some agenda trough from some activists in the gender debate.
However, a pitched-up male voice could have the same frequency content, and it wouldn't sound any weirder than this "neutral" voice.
Sounds like an extraordinary claim going unsubstantiated. Unlike that claim, the reason why voice assistants are overwhelmingly female is well known. It's because both users of both sexes overwhelmingly prefer a female voice in focus groups. That facet of Siri et al has been studied very thoroughly.
Also, if their criteria for recording was what people "identify" as that's not going to help much.
They would need people who are biologically both, hermaphrodites, or neither, neuters (i.e. hormonally castrato). And given that humans are by default biologically female (i.e. without hormones a human becomes female) I'm not surprised the voice sounds female.
Also, their "future" of people not identifying as male or female (I assume they mean that most people would be like that, not a minority) is not a future I desire.
Having males and females makes life far more enjoyable (for most).
The minority where that doesn't work for them shouldn't have a problem with the fact that others are. Anymore than someone atheist should have an issue with someone religious.
People (or voices) don't have to be similar to you in order for you to interact with them.
What I actually find the weirdest is when my ears hear female, it hears something British or South African. When my ears hear male, it hears a more American voice.
So is this just synthesised from two different speakers with different accents?
I imagine though if one of the big players would implement this we would see an insane amount of public debate and media coverage about whether the voice sounds like a man or a woman.
It seems like the typical "tech tries to solve social issues"
If some people want a genderless voice, yeah, I think tech companies should adopt it. If it makes someone more comfortable, and it doesn't harm me in any way, I'm not going to bag on it.
In any case, a blend of male and female is still just a blend of male and female. Genderless should stand for something that is neither male nor female, and I can't really see how you can achieve that by mixing male and female in any proportions.
Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
I didn't say all flight attendants are gay – this is obviously not the case. But some are, and I've met quite a few of them. And if I try to average out their voice and mannerisms in my mind, it leads me to a sonic place that's close to this voice.
Perhaps one day we'll have natural sounding voices, but until then I'd always prefer a more artificial sounding voice. Something something uncanny valley, I guess.
When I think about it, I've never heard anyone who is genderless, I've heard only male and female voices, so I wouldn't know how to compare!
The voice itself is well done. I'd use it, but in more "bubble to the top" form.
If you're not sure what problem it solves, just google 'alexa female' and you'll get plenty of articles to read, and, hopefully, consider.
I was pretty disappointed that all the major voice assistants have female voices and most of them have explicit female personas and names. I find it a little creepy to be honest.
At least Google didn't go for the whole personality crap. They could switch Google Assistant to this type of voice and it'd fit in. You can't switch Alexa to this type of voice while keeping that name.
You hear 'genderless' voices every day, which is to say, voices which one couldn't place as being male or female with any reasonable accuracy.
You'd be surprised at who in your immediate vicinity has more or less a non gendered voice if you didn't have all the other 'clues' as to their gender.
In the production of synthetic voices, surely we've come across many which are de-facto genderless already.
I don't know what you're reading, but HN is generally highly skeptical of those too, perhaps overly so. This is especially true with your web framework example.
Generally from those who have decided that their job is to find ways to be offended by everything. If Alexa and Siri had male voices by default, I have no doubt that the same people would be complaining that tech bros are erasing the historical contributions that women made as secretaries and assistants.
You know, I never understood why people trot this idea out so often. It's so irrational.
If people were rational, they would say "hmm, X doesn't offend me, but many people say that X offend them; perhaps they have a point."
Instead, only those who are incapable of understanding their own confirmation bias say "All these people say that X offends them; how silly."
I think this is a highly irrational take.
The better take would be: "Some people seem to be offended by everything; other people are not. What are the principal factors of a person that go into predicting 'will this person be offended by X'?"
Colossus (from Colossus: the Forbin Project) arguably had a more genderless voice than this.
Unfortunately this reinforces a binary perception of gender, and perpetuates stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress.
As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.
Q is an example of what we hope the future holds; a future of ideas, inclusion, positions and diverse representation in technology."
What stereotypes would this help to alleviate?
> the technology we create should follow.
Why it's a service that communications via artificial audio. Why is it important that you can't have a male or a female voice? People still exist, the voices in question don't have a physical appearance.
Though I don't feel strongly either way, my guess is that, since people usually leave software on defaults and female voices are typically chosen for voice assistants, the stereotype might be of women being servants.
You'd be surprised. The world is vast and gender roles are traditional in many cultures.
You can kind of make a logical link if you try, but I don't believe that's how it plays out in reality. It'll possibly be more relevant if/when these virtual assistants become indistinguishable from humans and perhaps have a physical form.
Well, if you say "base", then yeah that's very unlikely. However, their attitude doesn't need to be based on that, it could simply be supported by it, even a little bit.
If all your life you've seen women in a "serving" sort of role, like seeing only female nurses serving your medicine, female waitresses serving your food, female caretakers serving your kids and elders, female maids serving your house needs, and even your female-sounding phone serving your electronic needs, then in aggregate and in time that sets an idea, even a subconscious one, that contributes to your understanding of how the world works.
I don't see this genderless voice as being the solution to a problem. I see it as them just trying to do their small part in a change they want to see.
(I don't have a dog in this fight, I just don't see that this accomplishes what you want it to)
This technology is actually quite inconsistent with gender studies, which is why I find it quite baffling. Gender as an identity would imply that a female could have a deep gravelly voice and that a man could also have a higher pitched softer voice, as ones gender identity need not be dictated by their born sex or physical attributes.
This is quite fundamental to gender studies, making this tech not just useless, but completely counter intuitive to that project.
And silly, too. Regardless of what is going on inside a person's head (which we can choose to respect, absolutely), biologically there is definitely just two genders. You can identify however you like, modify if you wish, but in the end your body will be one or the other, right along with your voice.
Redefining gender is an uphill battle. I won't wish you good luck in doing that, I'd prefer coming up with a new term for this goal.
No, a very very small portion. Gender doesn't vary independently from sex, you'd be hard pressed to find a stronger correlation. It's misleading to consider them as totally separate things.
What sort of "intersex conditions" are large portions of the world born with? What do you mean by "large portion?" Like 50%? 30%?
Happy to follow a link if you don't want to type it out and would rather paste a URL
People who neither identify as male nor female AND want to listen to a gender-neutral voice seems like a very niche market.
Companies want their voice-enabled products to be purchased. Revulsion doesn't help.
It seems possible, from my perspective, there is enough motivation to go around to work on multiple issues at once.
While climate change, over-fishing, land degradation, certainly could do with more attention, gender issues represent a fairly immediate threat for some people in some places at some times.
But if we were playing the priority game, I'd say that the gender issues that represent immediate threats are stuff like domestic violence and sexual assault. It's reasonable to argue that reducing overall gender bias affects those, but it's a very subtle and long-term effect - and likely beyond the AGW event horizon. It's not going to do anything about the immediate threat.
I find synthetic voices, vocaloid and virtual actors (like “virtual” youtubers) to be interesting in that they when replacing something usually performed by a human, they often do it in way lower quality due to technical limitations.
So it theory here should be a lower appeal to it, but on the other hand there’s a ton of side effects and “disruptive” uses that make the technology useful for a population different from what was intended.
From the top of my head this “neutral” voice could be nice for phone guidance or voice translation, where the awkwardness of the voice could be an advantage. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a bumber of people came forward to declare this the thing they’ve been waiting for years.
I find something offputting that so many agents pick a female voice (e.g. Alexa, Siri)
A human has to be in the recording booth to create the vocal library. Also you can change the Siri voice to not only be Male, but also have a different accent.
do they? i mean, we're not great at synthesizing natural-sounding voices yet, but that's a technical challenge – not something inherent to the problem.
I don't think it's possible to assert that it's purely a technical challenge before we understand the goal clearly, beyond "I'll know it when I hear it".
Its research based, not merely "sexism":
https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/tech/innovation/female-comput...
One could argue that a computer assistant should have a human-like voice and an overwhelming majority of humans have distinctly male or female voices.
Also seems to me like it's somewhat camp - a neutral voice in that regard would also be worth exploring
Confident and helpful -- shouldn't that be the aim? Doesn't that sound different for men and women? And across different nationalities?
Q sounds unsure of itself to me... and just weird. I wouldn't prefer this voice to Siri or just about any of the old MacOS voices.
* Mac OS X TTS (Text-To-Speech) Voices - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4hqUxb9MmY
I'd install it.
But calling something "Q" is a weird choice, considering a recent conspiracy theory
That's not a world I want to be part of.
Ergo, that sentence sounds like someone is asking not to be boxed in by their gender.
Why is that not something you can support?
If you pay close attention, most of the cultural debate over gender identity issues relates not to eliding distinctions and expectations, but to reshaping the boundaries and expectations of those identities.
It's easier to see what I mean by this with the debate over racism and affirmative action. In the U.S. most white people think equality means being "color blind"--so blind that some refuse to even admit that non-overt racism is possible. In truth civil rights in the U.S. has never been about eliding or ignoring [racial] distinctions, but changing expectations. As long as power differentials exist (and they will always exist), these expectations will matter and will constantly shift.
Another way to look at it is that any identity is by definition exclusive. And identities only matter because they imply a default set of expectations. If you say that people should be literally free to choose their identity, you're allowing people to freely reinterpret and redefine the implied expectations and shared _meaning_ of that identity, which can be injurious to those who previously chose that identity. There's an inherent conflict, there. It's why as a white male I can't go around identifying as a black female, certainly not without making substantial changes to my behavior and perhaps even physical appearance, changes that should be consonant with what being a "black female" means. To do otherwise would be another kind of violence.
You can't really understand any of these issues without understanding and appreciating the genesis--power. It's all about power over others. We can never have a society without power differentials because that would imply the power to _refuse_ to recognize the identities others have chosen for themselves. Power matters not because it's per se evil, but how it's used and how it's distributed and what are the concrete results in people's lives.
In adjudicating conflicts over what the expectations for an identity are, one must take into account how power is used and abused and by whom. For example, it's legitimately problematic for a man to argue that transgender women shouldn't be allowed in women's bathrooms because of the threat of violence. It's problematic because it's another instance of a man making decisions about what it means to be a women, and men have historically abused their social and economic positions when drawing these boundaries to disadvantage women more generally. The logic of the argument is secondary to the power politics, because fundamentally it's really about the power politics. It's more legitimate for women to make that argument, and in so much as they do make it it carries more weight (notwithstanding that women as a group are certainly capable of abusing their relative powers), but in actuality they've been less vociferous about it.
The line of thinking that says power differentials are inherently wrong and/or that we should elide the implications of identities are inconsistent. If only things were so simple....
Identity is by definition a set of expectations. To lose those expectations is to lose a facet of identity.
There's a group of people who want to remove that facet of their identity, cool, I support them. But I like that facet of my identity, and I like the fact that most people around me also express that facet of their identity. I don't want want to be genderless or to live in a genderless world. Do not marginalise me for being that way.
I have been a sort of outsider all of my life, but I don't think the extreme catering to the undefined individual is the best thing for humans as a group. If anything, it makes us more atomized, and I have yet to be convinced that individuals tend to happier when they have been maximally individualized.
People should have the freedom to not identify with gender, or want a gender neutral voice assistant, but I don't see how a genderless society is preferable.
> Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using additive synthesis and an acoustic model (physical modelling synthesis. Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components.
eSpeak NG text-to-speech: 1.49.2
By doing formant synthesis, we can make speech sounds maximally contrastive. Part of what makes natural speech sound as it does is because the physical and linguistic process that generates it causes assimilation. The period of time during which a phoneme sounds also contains information about neighboring sounds.
So I was expecting something easy to listen to.
The settings for that text snippet were
$ espeak -p 100 -s 1000 -v male7
That's really the optimum for me for speeds over 650 pwm.
I think the stated purpose is stupid, though. Gendered roles are good. They give people a purpose and make them happier. I really pity the little girls who get forced into things like engineering just because their parents wanted to be hip and "genderless".
I've given input on political issues as well as gender issues under multiple identities and personas to gain consensus
Almost no progress on consensus regarding political issues but on some sex and gender issues the male persona was unqualified to "mansplain" or had to much privilege to contribute or complain, where the same information was agreed upon and deemed helpful coming from the non-male persona - assumed to be female
This is more about the decision path people make to discredit a someone. When confronted with information that deviates from your script, people typically look for faults in the messenger instead of the actual information. You look for words that a different party would use exclusively to pigeonhole the messenger as the other, you look for other biases.
I felt that even if an A.I. was created to try to aggregate perspectives and offer its observations, people would try to disagree with it based on who created it. A valid criticism, but what would be left with to offer potentially unifying perspectives.
I like this and I imagine how it can be trained to create a voice that you agree with, but that nobody else would hear.
..... based on your cookies.
Then everybody gets to hear a different voice and mostly the same information - perhaps slightly different words as to not undermine the illusion.
Grow up
This is getting out of hand, it's unnatural, fits strictly in the uncanny valley, and is borderline disgusting; both in terms of sound and in terms of politico-cultural values and intentions.
It's part of a socio-cultural Zeitgeist which actively combats values which I think are worth defending.