What problem does this solve?
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."
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.