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Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

This seems really cool and I can see some great use cases. But the marketing is very odd to me. It says it will let me express myself in a voice that is truly my own…but I can already do that with my natural voice. That seems more likely to be unique than what I would get by adjusting it in software.

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I guess the wording is awkward, but as a trans person, I still resonate with it. I'm acutely aware it's not going to be "my voice", but neither is the one I have right now.

It's funny to me that we just had a big front-page thread full of HN users questioning the value of diversity, and then this thread where people struggle to figure out the obvious trans market for voice-changing software.

Non-verbal people might also be interested in such things

Thanks for the explanation. This is definitely something I hadn't considered.

Outside of the trans use-case mentioned here, I could imagine some women gamers getting value out of this too. You kinda need voice comms to play some games properly, and not wanting to reveal yourself as a woman online, especially over voip, is completely reasonable. Because gamers are terrible. Something like this could make hiding that trivial, assuming the latency is accurate (would need to be very fast in some games)

Are gamers really more toxic towards women than men? I feel like switching gender will just switch one kind of toxicity to another.

Less about toxicity, more about the barrage of creepy messages and cyber stalking. To be clear, I’m a man saying these things. I think it’s neat we’re able to do things like this now and it’s neat to think of what it can do to solve old problems. This is just one more hypothetical.

Yes, unfortunately. It's not a rigorous scientific study, but one recent experiment that I think is illuminating:

https://esports.gg/news/valorant/male-valorant-pros-face-sex...

> The experiment showed just how drastically a woman’s voice can impact the score of a player. One male pro played with his normal voice and earned 15 kills with two deaths. When playing Valorant with a female voice, his score almost completely inversed with three kills and 16 deaths after the other players refused to cooperate in the game.

> The pro players also endured being mocked and insulted with sexist slurs. Many will recognize this as the average experience of women in gaming. During their games, one male teammate told a pro to go back to the kitchen. Likewise, another teammate told the female-voiced pro that “all women should just die.”

Yeah, we used to play CS:GO quite a bit and the one girl we knew who played was both very good and constantly harassed. When we 4-queued, we'd just boot the other guy who was being annoying. The rest of the time it was mute and shun. I was GNM at my highest, she was GE but had to play on an alt to play with us (too high rank dispersion will fail to queue for matchmaking). Once or twice when we got higher (MG or so) there was less of it. I got maybe a few comments about competency (rightfully I suppose) but she got them all the time and she was way better.

To help clarify: The Gold Nova Master rank is like 60th percentile. GE is 99th.

It's not a perfect shield against online toxicity that's for sure, but the online voice-enabled gaming world is not kind to women:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/online-gaming-in-20...

It's certainly not kind to men either, and your source does not make any comparisons between men and women in this regard.

Sibling comment source makes a more compelling case for why women receive more abuse than me.

> 30% of the 489 women polled - almost one in three - said they had experienced abuse and toxicity when gaming online

> Of this 30%, the majority (72%) said the abuse was misogynistic. By comparison, none of the male respondents reported any gender-based discrimination or abuse

Ok, I missed that. So they did compare men in the specific category of "gender-based discrimination". Now if you look up this comment thread, you will see that the question I posed was "Are gamers really more toxic towards women than men? I feel like switching gender will just switch one kind of toxicity to another." So if you wanted to actually answer this question, you would compare how much abuse and toxicity women receive compared to men. This is not something that the linked article tries to do, at all. "30% of the 489 women polled - almost one in three - said they had experienced abuse and toxicity when gaming online" - so is that more than men, or is that less than men?

That particular line is definitely directed towards people with gender identity issues.

Salesperson: You test drive any car on the lot!

You: Why? I already own a 2002 Ford Escape...

I'm not trying to make fun of you, I think you actually have a unique and impressive perspective! I've always hated hearing my voice on answering machines, so if I could choose any voice I'd choose Chris Cornell or Morgan Freeman.

Pro tip: Some people do not consider their natural voice 'their' voice.

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