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Comment by tmcw | Hacker News Reader

The Hacker News crowd is very concerned about people "inventing something that doesn't need to be invented" when that thing strays anywhere near social and cultural issues rather than a shiny new startup or web framework.

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.

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just google 'alexa female' and you'll get plenty of articles to read

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.

The top results are from lead tech editors at the guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

I don't know about the WSJ, but the Guardian has published plenty of such articles.

> Generally from those who have decided that their job is to find ways to be offended by everything.

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'?"

My take on these situations is that they are NP-complete in a way: looking at something (the assistant voice for example) with a clear and objective mind and trying to figure out a way it's offensive is much harder that verifying whether an offensive attitude is being portrayed by that thing.

Keep in mind that a lot of the offense-taking you see happening publicly is done entirely on purpose. Think of it as adult/Internet equivalent of a child throwing a tantrum to see if they can manipulate their parents into getting what they want. In both cases, bowing down to the threats is not the right answer.

Siri does default to male in some countries, the UK one is male.

There's a lot of people saying that alexa is a girl because it's perceived as more helpful. But have we thought about the fact that maybe it's perceived as more nice or as less threatening? There's a reason movie villains are stereotypically male voice actors - deeper male voices sound less friendly, forget helpful.

These gender stereotypes are the reason why this voice exists.

Is that natural instinct or societal training? If we start using non-female voices for voice assistants, maybe we can train people that a voice doesn't have to be female to be helpful. Otherwise if we use female voices because society is just used to it, then we're just reinforcing an unnecessary stereotype for convenience.

Forget helpful, maybe it's more kind? I don't know if it's "societal training" or not, but it's not our job, nor is it that of a company, to try to "train people". Deliberately introducing something that makes your customers uncomfortable is not a responsible action for a company to take upon the part of its shareholders.

i'm pretty sure it's because hollywood has been conditioning us to hear flat affect male robot voices as sinister for 50 years

I like this, but it's probably too late for all tech companies, except maybe Google.

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.

It varies by country. Siri has a male voice in the UK.

It's configurable. For English you can choose Male or Female for American, Australian, British, Irish, and South African accents: https://i.imgur.com/IeJH9wu.png

heh, seems you replied at the same time as me and included a screenshot. Bastard! ;P

You can choose male and female voices for the following accents: American, Australian, British, Irish, and South African. Source: my iPhone.

I didn’t know Irish or ZA; I’ve been using Australian for awhile, maybe it’s time for a switch.

Right, but US iPhones come with a female voice by default, while British ones come set to a male voice.

> when that thing strays anywhere near social and cultural issues rather than a shiny new startup or web framework.

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.

It's simply not an invention or even something to go on about.

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.

As a blind person I'm going to have to pretty strongly disagree with this. A vast majority of the voices I hear do in fact read as male or female even without visual indicators.

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