I mean no offense, but how is this really solving any problems? How is inventing a new voice many people are uncomfortable with really making the world a better place? A user configurable male/female voice could just work.
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.