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Comment by mises | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I see the problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female, and I certainly wouldn't buy this. It just sounds wrong, and I can't quite say why. I guess after all the work tech companies have put into trying to sound like a person, this deliberately doesn't.

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.

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>Also, it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower.

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.

There is no problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female; what's the problem with some other voice assistant sounding genderless?

> 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.

> There is no problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female; what's the problem with some other voice assistant sounding genderless?

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.

> it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower.

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".

> it also sounds like a high pitched male

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.

It actually does sound like they tried to blend multiple voices. It sounds very tinny and robotic; and not particularly non-gendered imo.

It does, but that is deceptive. Voice is determined by the pitch of the vocal tract and the spectral filtering caused by its shape: the "formant". Both can be manipulated digitally to create different voices.

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).

To be fair, most cartoon boy characters don't really sound like real boys. If you listen to their voice without looking at the character, it becomes obvious that it's a woman.

They are close enough that you don't have to deal with the nightmare that is child talent.

You're quite right, but that at least sounds like a person. It's this unnatural almost-human type thing I can't stand. Also, I'm not signing up for alexa with a cartoon boy's voice any time soon.

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