Siri and Her Girls: Why So Many Robot Helpers Are Ladies

> marketers have an easier time finding a universally

> likeable female voice than a male one

This article could have shorter, the rest of it seems to spend half the time explaining why it's ok to discount conflicting evidence and the other half throwing out conjecture on why the premise of sexism might possibly be slightly accurate.

Is it really that weird that different cultures end up with different genders for a friendly, non-judgemental, disembodied and slightly inhuman mechanical voice? How weird would it be if there was no cultural preference? If the preference was always 50.0/50.0? Now that would be unlikely!

There are so many factors here, some of which are, no doubt, cultural stereotypes about gender. Doesn't it seem more likely that the "friendly" and "non-judgemental" part is the stereotype? Even if it's not, since the author makes it clear this is an open question why are all the options twisted into an anti-women stereotype?

> This dovetails with the way stereotypes

> work; our prejudices make us dislike hearing

> a man go about secretarial work

Are you fucking kidding me? That's a stretch for an explanation of why men and women find the women's voice more likeable. Why not the much more likely Loving Mother stereotype? Sure, it's all conjecture and that's fine, but the author has clearly made up her mind that this is sexist and is trying to figure out why. That seems backwards if you are interested in truth.

I like how he ignores that the British Siri is male... And even goes so far as to admit he's doing so.

"That's women's work" doesn't really hold up for me. I have never once thought, "I have a question. I'd better go find a woman to ask, because that's women's work." I don't even think that "female" is a helpdesk stereotype. I certainly don't have any expectations when I start looking for a help desk.

Now if he had said that people associate 'friendly' voices with women, and 'competitive' voices with men, that would fall along more typical stereotypes, and I might believe that. Maybe.

Ignores the #1 reason I use chose the female voice for most electronics. It sounds better and is more clearly understood coming out of under powered speakers at low volume.

I remember hearing somewhere that the voice system in fighter planes is female because if a man is at the edge of losing consciousness (as fighter pilots can be during high-g maneuvers because of blood rushing away from their heads towards their legs), the sound of a woman's voice is more likely to keep him conscious.

I've heard anecdotally that the reason computer voices and avatars tend to be women is that people tend to respond better and believe the data more.

The story that was told to me (don't know if it's true, couldn't find a link) was that they did testing on astronauts and they found that the male astronauts tended to disagree more with a male voice. Whereas "the voice of mother" was more likely to be found credible.

Again, I don't know if it's true, but it seemed to make sense to me at the time.

At the very beginning of the article, the author claims robots (as opposed to bodiless ai voices). She mentions Rosie as an exception, but I can think of a whole bunch more. The terminator from T3, the sexy robots from Svedka's vodka campaign, even the robot from 1927's metropolis. I think it is worth noting that all of these robots (except for Rosie, of course) fall under the category of sexy robot. But I also think this is pretty clearly a not well thought out article. And I, myself, certainly wouldn't make the claim that all female robots with bodies are sexy after spending all of 30 seconds brainstorming on it... as opposed to the author of the article...

Because VoiceOver (Apple’s screenreader) uses a female voice. At least if you pick US English as your language. You will get a male voice if you pick British English or French. (Siri uses the same voice as the screenreader. There is only one per language, unlike on the Mac where you can pick from different voices.)

What’s the underlying reason for Apple picking a female US English voice for VoiceOver? They probably bought the voice that whoever worked on it liked best and that also worked with the limited resources on the iOS devices.

The default voice for VoiceOver on the Mac is “Alex”, a male voice. It sounds much better than the iPhone’s voice, probably because a Mac can throw much more resources at voice synthesis. I bet the iPhone would use “Alex” as its US English voice if it had the chops to do so.

All the rest is the author’s silly imagination. Go ahead and ask Siri what sex it is.

I noticed this a few months ago, when I realized that my phone's Google navigation, all the GPS devices I'd ever used, and most of the text-to-speech I've heard in general, default to a female voice.

Why? I have no idea, but I doubt it's because we have this unconscious desire to "keep women in their place". Could it be rather that men are less likely to "argue" with a female voice than the perceived competition of a male voice? And that some women, in turn, might not like being ordered around by a man's voice while driving? Plus, as another poster mentioned, the higher register of a typical female voice may stand out better against the noise of the road, the engine, etc.

Of course, I could just be fooling myself--maybe subconsciously I just want to keep female voices in these kind of "support" positions. Who knows.

An article on this topic deserves one mention of Majel Barrett, doesn't it?

Because we like girls more.

Bollocks. Higher voices are simply easier to hear over urban noise.