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Why Computer Voices Are Mostly Female
PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article exploring the question posed in the headline, which says that "One answer may lie in biology. Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women's voices more pleasing than men's. 'It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,' said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of 'The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships. 'It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.' One notable exception has been Germany, where BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on its 5 Series cars in the late 1990s after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on why the company gave Siri a female voice in the U.S. Nor would she say why Siri speaks like a man in the UK, where iPhone 4S owners have swarmed online forums to request a female voice instead."
The library around here had an autodialer that would remind folks about late materials and when books were available, they used a pleasant voice from a black gentleman. It had a James Earl Jones quality to it and was quite pleasant despite being relatively unsophistication in use. Meaning that the words were taken from samples so they wouldn't quite match up even if the grammar was correct.
One day I had the interesting observation on the New York Subway that the recorded voices with informational statements were female, and the statements asking the passenger to do something ("Please stand clear of the door") were all male.
Female computer voice: Star Trek
Male computer voice = HAL 9000
Nothing good ever came from a male computer.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Surely most people prefer to listen to the opposite sex, provided they do not suffer from sexual identity disorder or a similar crippling condition ...
I assume then that being British counts as a similar crippling condition?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
So this is why Holly got replaced by Hilly?
So US Siri is a secretary and UK Siri is a gentleman's gentleman ?
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Actually, no. Research has shown better response to female voices by both men and women.
Clearly they have never heard Morgan Freeman.
A toggle switch.
In the BMW it could be a real physical toggle somewhere, but an OS setting would work as well. In Apple's case they need to relax a little, pull the stick out, and let the people toggle which voice they want, even MS allows that on their voice related functions.
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My question is, why aren't users simply given a choice? If they've put the effort into making both voice sets, let the user choose which one they prefer. Then again, this is Apple we're talking about.
In the army there is a known fact/myth that female voices are easier to understand on noisy radio links.
Something to do white the a different/better frequency spread than a male voice.
In my not very scientific experience, it seems to be true.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
"where BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on its 5 Series cars in the late 1990s after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman"
Urban myth that dovetails nocely with american stereotypical views of foreigners, Germans in particular.
Surely most people prefer to listen to the opposite sex, provided they do not suffer from sexual identity disorder or a similar crippling condition ...
I'm guessing it's the same phenomenon as with magazines. The manly magazines are full of highly attractive women. The womanly magazines are also full of highly attractive women. Men like talking to a woman. Women like talking to another woman. It probably goes all the way back to our cavemen days where women were chatting at camp or out gathering, while the men were more rivals and out hunting pray, which obviously leads to less talking. So most everyone feels better talking to a woman, except when taking directions on where to drive. Which some say can also be traced back to our cavemen days...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Garmin allows you to pick from a number of different voices, with different regional accents and languages as well.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Everyone can appreciate that, even if they don't understand what's being said.
Even assuming the 1990s were the middle ages, this is hard to believe. Firstly, nearly all navigational systems I've encountered here in Germany in the past ten years have female voices (if they have any), and the public transport system's automated announcements have been made by a female voice since forever.
I've read (though I can't quote sources, sorry) that the main reason computerised voices on navigation aids is female is the higher pitch. In jets where that sort of thing was pioneered it made the voice easier to distinguish clearly from the "background" noise of the engines without having to raise the volume, and presumably the difference is similar in cars.
There may be cultural reasons too, of course, but this theory of a physical reason makes sense to me.
From my experience the gender of the synthetic voices has been male by default so I don't recognize this. The default voice on the old Amiga narrator.device was male. The default voice on loud-reading software used to be NeoSpeech Paul which has been one of the best English spoken computer narrator compilations out there.
The GPS software I have used have both male and female voices in different languages to choose from, I have primarily used TomTom and Navigon. I cannot recall that I preferred one gender over the other.
Telephone voices on the other hand have from my experience been dominated by females, and we're talking about automated phone services and phone queue notifications. But seriously, I wouldn't care whether the voice is male or female.
There may or may not be some bearing in the statements regarding the gender of the computer voice although I seriously doubt it. But when I read the following:
"What's interesting to me is how they seem to intentionally make her speech sound artificial -- they could choose to make her speech more seamless and human-like, but they choose instead to highlight the technology,"
I seriously started to believe that this article is paid for by Apple. Making a really good and natural voice is a very difficult undertaking and I have not yet heard a perfect and seamless computer voice that sounds as natural as a real human.
I'd prefer Woodie Allen's voice.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
That's because men are horny and women are gossipy.
Whoever wrote this story hasn't been listening to the republican debate. I want to poke out my eardrums whenever michelle bachman speaks, sorry, screams.
Liberty.
In WW2 ground controllers for the British Air Force were almost all women. I was told (by someone who had good reason to know) that there was a debate about whether to have women radio operators in the aircraft. There were two reasons: One was more reliable communication, the other was to prevent the Germans spoofing aircraft radio operators. A number of women operators were asked for their views and immediately volunteered to fly (a very dangerous occupation). Despite this, the proposal was turned down. The attitudes at the time were truly backward; there were women pilots who were allowed to deliver aircraft to their bases, but they were not allowed to fly with guns loaded - a quite incomprehensible decision since some of them were shot down by enemy action without a chance of fighting back.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This doesn't seem to be the case for narrators.
Pretty sure that neither Oprah nor Sigourney Weaver were considered more pleasing than David Attenborough.
Least for IVRs, on average people find male voices more intimidating than female voices. We also find female voices more nurturing than male voices on average.
Other posters have already point this out. Suggestions ( facilitated by nurturing speaker ) then women are used. Commands ( facilitated by intimidation, i.e. subtle threat of punishment ) then males are more often used.
Systems where you may need to intimidate the listener a bit will tend to use male voices. I kid you not, but in the future pay attention to how many collections operators or conflict desks sound 'black'. Also think of how often you spoke to a collections/conflict department and got a deep voiced male. Now compare that to how often you called the general operator and got a deep voiced male.
It seems to me though that most audiobooks are read by men, and of the ones I have read by women, I find the voice irritating. These are real people though, maybe its more to do with how male and female voices are synthed.
which one?
I like female voices on GPS in particular because the frequency spread of a typical female voice is easier to hear (over engine drone, wind noise, etc) regardless of the vehicle I'm driving, and whether I have the targa roof off my car, or driving a truck, I can still hear it but sometimes the male voices are diminished - plus the voices are sometimes more pleasant.
"Forvever Alone"
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I'd Mod you +5 Sexist.
Ah but there is. It means a Woman that speaks. Spokeswoman. It's like a spokesperson but more specific.
I like his voice okay. I'd rather listen to a woman talk to me though. I'm just wired that way.
Sir David Frederick Attenborough.
Privacy is terrorism.
Surely? Is it possible that you don't understand that women experience a lot of ups and downs, due to hormonal changes? While women MIGHT prefer a male voice SOMETIMES, there are other times that she might prefer that men don't exist. And, no, pregnancy and menstrual cycles are NOT considered to be crippling conditions. Menopause might be considered as such, but don't let my wife know that I said that!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Discussion is over. The primary demographic for BMW's is insecure middle aged men who can't even listen to a computer for fear of degrading their "Macho"! Soooo pathetic.
after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman.
For real? Not only were these men pissed off about taking direction from a computerized woman's voice, but they also felt it necessary to call BMW to bitch about it. And then, BMW took these tools seriously enough to recall the cars? This just has to be a urban legend.
[runs off to check snopes]
Because computer programmers are mostly male.
How come every xtranormal video has the male character teaching the uninformed and/or ignorant female character?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Most female voices are grating unless lower pitched than average, ( just listen to any local female news caster....GRATING) I think the real reason is that you are telling the voice what to do and subconsciously marketing views women as subservient, I honestly believe males are generally more pleasant to listen to due to the deeper tone.
I'll toss a little homophobia on top as most men want a female voice.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
In the US, we only recognize ONE austrian accent. And only a few phrases, at that: "It's not a tumor, Vote for me if you want to live" "I'll be back a la vista," and "Ha, ha, ha. You have strucked Hercules."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
that's why.
The one that the people speaking that little known Austrian language have, duh.
Morgan Freeman
...would all probably be universally accepted.
...you add some more...
David Attenborough
Mike Rowe
Patrick Stewart
Unacceptable:
Bobcat Goldthwait
Almost anyone from Pulp Fiction ( Christopher Walken, Steve Buschemi, John Travolta....Sammuel Jackson's voice might not be bad.)
Chairman Kaga
Marlon Brando
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
You are listening to NOAA's national weather service station...
(Sounds like Stephen Hawking to me...)
How come nobody has mentioned Peter Tuddenham (Zen from B7)
As far as narrating a story, or documentary I have always frefered male british voices. (Richard Burton, Patrick Stewart, John Hurt, Sir John Geilgud) but then I was born in a Commonwealth country.
That doesn't mean 'only hang out with dudes', it means 'don't screw over your friends to get laid'.
My fav is when the sexy unreal 2004 voice say 'Holy Shit'. Sounds like she is creaming herself.
Uh, it's more like: Men like talking to women and women like one-upping each other. Seriously, women can be flat out evil to each other. It's a competition to them. That's why if you're already with a woman it makes you a lot more attractive to other women, they see it as a challenge.
In that way women like to look at other beautiful women in order to see what they need to do to beat them (or at least compete at the same level) and win the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kayFrIR-Qfw
Have gnu, will travel.
Or maybe this is a reverse Monty Python drag skit in the making?
I saw a video online recently about a upcoming iPad app that uses a voice to interact with the user. Based on the name the user gives during setup, the app responds to female users with a female voice, and responds to male users with the same female voice... flirting like a horny spokesmodel on a late-night-TV phone-sex advert. Like that episode Star Trek where the [i]Enterprise[/i] computer has been overhauled by the women of planet Estrogen-5 (or whatever) and starts flirting with every crewmember who isn't wearing a miniskirt. But without the excuse of it being done in the 1960s. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of juvenile hetero men out there who would love this kind of half-century throwback, but I just found it annoying, to the point that I didn't even finish watching the demo, and I sure as hell won't bother looking at the app when it comes out.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You know what happened last time germans listened to an austrian?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Academic studies always show that we prefer female voices, but in reality, those who count on computer generated voices all day prefer male voices. Note all the readers mentioning James Earl Jones. The reason studies like this get it wrong is simple. They get random groups of people who never use computer voices to take part in their experiments, and such people initially prefer female voices. If the experiments were to run long enough for participants to become expert listeners, they would find they trend towards male voices. I do a lot of looking at speech signals, and my unsupported theory as to why we switch to male voices is that male voices cover a broader portion of the sweet spot in our hearing, where we perceive sound most sensitively. This makes male voices easier to listen to if you have to listen for long periods of time. They are also easier to understand in noisy environments, thus thus the classic low male ham radio voice.
To understand what people like when they have to listen a lot to computer generated voices, just ask the blind. I was the tech lead for Vinux 3.0, which is Linux for the Vision Impaired. That doesn't make me an expert, but here are my observations. The most popular voices for blind programmers are male, probably eloquence first (it can play very fast), followed by espeak (because it's free and everywhere), followed by various low-speed commercial male voices. The most popular Mac voice for the blind is Adam, a mechanical guy with a decent voice that can play at decent speed. The female voices are often discussed, usually with adjectives like sexy, emotional, sultry, and so on, but in the end the blind go back to their male TTS engines to get work done.
I did a lot of testing to try and speed up voices to the speeds the blind like to listen. The result is the sonic library, which powers speech speed-up in various programs like the Astro Nova player at up to 6X playback speed. At least one blind lister can listen with high comprehension to a male voice (eloquence) at about 1,500 words per minute, or 7X the default speed of this high speed voice. At this speed, the original vowels are typically compressed to one or two pitch periods. It's incredible that a blind listener can still perceive these as whole phonemes. To achieve higher speed, I've told him he needs to consider listening to a female voice, where I could get perhaps twice as many pitch periods into the same 10-ish milliseconds where he currently perceives one phoneme. The problem is that at higher fundamental pitch, this voice will register on a smaller portion of his hearing bandwidth, making it harder to get as much information out of it high speed. We've not yet had any luck with high speed female voices.
As a person losing central vision, I experienced all this myself. When I first started using computer generated voices, I tried to find a female voice I could live with. I tried a couple of smooth female Cepstral voices, but before long they sounded grating and frustratingly slow. My blind friend told me to avoid the "natural" voices and go with something that I could listen to at high speed, but I just couldn't stand the mechanical voice he was pushing - eloquence. Well, he was right. I eventually migrated to eloquence just like him and many blind people. James Earl Jones has the perfect voice for computers. It's low enough to take advantage of every bit of bandwidth we easily perceive. It's broad spectrum, taking advantage of the high frequencies as well, and very consistent, making his voice addictive. Your ear likes consistency.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
1) Include female synthesized voices in Germany and other places which prefer male.
2) Include male synthesized voices in the USA and other places which prefer female.
3) Sell "value enhancement" packages of other voices for $10 a shot.
4) Profit!
5) Uhm, where's my slice of the pie for thinking of the idea?
maybe she's just really butch
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made. - Otto von Bismarck
Question: How fast of a modem can he 'read' ascii from? 110, 300, 2400?
I would pay good money (as opposed to Bitcoins) to listen to James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman have a conversation about types of cheese.
unacceptable sylvester stallone Gilbert Gottfried
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Very interesting theory. As someone who only occasionally hears a computer generated voice each week, I definitely prefer it to be female. And I prefer her to be tenor/alto, not soprano.
damaged by dogma
Mainly because of Star Trek
Your question is answered, and your theory doesn't quite fit:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/health/HealthRepublish_1428081.htm
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
For my computer generated voices, I prefer a raspy, sensual voice, with a hint of lasciviousness. Compliant, or even coy at times, yet surprisingly assertive when you least expect it.
Every talking GPS unit I have had, I find the higher pitch of the female voice to cut thru the low frequency background noise of driving better than the mail voices.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
um, because they are?
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
Hardly a relevant statement. When it is in reference to long-term friends vs a girl you just met, that is where the bro's before ho's comes into play. If you are thinking which you would rather look at or listen to when neither has a history, if a male chooses bro over ho, that would imply homosexuality.
So you're like the others here, and prefer James Earl Jones...
damaged by dogma
when they first implemented their subway system between gates. It has changed a few times since then but being a product of that generation many of us used to comment on it all the time in BBS days.
Personal favorite female voice on a computer was the voice used in Mechwarrior 2.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
My custom made GPS navigation unit in my car with my wife's voice .... :-)
In my limited experience, older ears seem to lose the high frequencies more/first.
My hearing test charts show a simple linear roll-off (log-log) plot
Right - 6 dB/octave
Left - 8 dB/octave
Age - 66
My mother-in-law was worse. Above 3kHz, it just fell to nothing. She couldn't understand most female voices. Age 90.
--
A POW in the war of wits
... beats HAL9000s insanity with pure, unadulterated malice.
So, nothing evil ever came from a male computer, either.
See
Told yah so!
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Ambient temperature: 145 degrees.
All systems: nominal
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Maternal trust & comfort seems a more like culprit than sexual attraction.
There has been plenty of research showing that female voices are easier to pickup in a noisy airplane cockpit. I would not be surprised if the same holds in a car.
The BMW story really has a citation needed tag as far as I see it. A university professor, specialized in avionics told me the same thing, but about some airlines (situated in some politically and religiously conservative countries) who complained that their pilots did not want to listen to a female voice.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Surely most people prefer to listen to the opposite sex, provided they do not suffer from sexual identity disorder or a similar crippling condition ...
Sexual identity disorder? Crippling condition? ... holy fuck.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS