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Comment by ar7hur | Hacker News Reader

Synopsys:

    Walking backward in time, Adam discussed the technical
    history of Siri as well as how the vision of virtual
    personal assistants evolved over time. He wowed the 
    audience with a video from 1987 on a concept from Apple
    where predicted a Siri like device 24 years in the future
    and was only off by 2 weeks.

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Unfortunately brought 1980s gender prejudices with it. Siri and Cortana defaulting to female voices? Way to miss an opportunity, market leaders.

1) Siri has a male voice available as a configuration option.

2) There have been frequent studies which show that there is a natural (i.e. not cultural) bias towards finding female voices more pleasant, and such preferences begin in the womb[1]. CNN[2] has a story which provides a good overview of this topic, and I am sure you could find other information about if you feel so inclined.

Basically, I do not think the decision to make Siri female was based upon simple prejudice. There are good, scientific reasons for doing so.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/208/4448/1174.short

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/tech/innovation/female-compute...

I hadn't really thought about that. My wife is a feminist and it is one of the things that drew me to her. She has definitely helped me recognize these kinds of things in the past. And I have become more sensitive to this, but clearly I have a ways to go.

Thanks for bringing this up.

In France, Siri has a male voice!

Pas mal! But lurking beneath France's crisp white egalitarian shell lies a deeply unequal, slime-ridden underbelly.

Still, every little helps.

When designing Siri, the people involved crafted a backstory for Siri, answering questions like "Is Siri a male or a female?", "Is Siri human, computer, or something else?", "Is Siri an Apple employee (or what's the relationship to Apple)", etc. You'll be happy to know that Siri was designed to be neither male nor female, no matter what voice it speaks with -- ask it and you will see...

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