A Web Around the World, Part 6: Routing Calls

> (When was the last time a computer, smartphone, or GPS gadget spoke to you in a male voice?)

All the time, on both my PC and my Mac. The default for screen readers for the blind has historically been, and largely still is, a male voice, or at least an artificial voice in a typically male pitch range. Maybe that's because we were early adopters of speech synthesis, and the early robotic voices sounded better at lower pitches. But even today, on Windows 10 and macOS Monterey, the built-in screen reader uses a natural-sounding, but still male, voice. On mobile platforms though, the screen readers use a female voice by default, at least in US English.