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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."
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.
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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?
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So US Siri is a secretary and UK Siri is a gentleman's gentleman ?
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Actually, no. Research has shown better response to female voices by both men and women.
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.
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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...
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Garmin allows you to pick from a number of different voices, with different regional accents and languages as well.
Dog is my co-pilot.
From TFA:
'"It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes..."'
It's not that there are no people who find male voices pleasant or prefer them in some circumstances. Just that _generally_ people prefer female voices. I certainly do.
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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.
Giving the user a choice would imply that they know better than Apple does about what is best.
Apple's entire business model is founded on the operational assumption that they know better than the customer. Their present success is founded on the fact that they are quite often correct about this....
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.
um, i just googled "bmw recall female voice" and got this: http://www.pbs.org/speak/ahead/technology/voiceinterface/
It doesn't appear to be mythical.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
How about we just use James Earl Jones for everything? I think I'd be fine with that...
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."
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.
You just linked to an article that cites the same guy that is also cited by TFA.
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Because Geoge Takei also has a really wonderful voice, not to mention that Leonard Nimoy isn't too bad either.
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Meaning that the words were taken from samples so they wouldn't quite match up even if the grammar was correct.
The trick there. Is to hire Shatner for. The voice. acting. ThenNoOneWillKnowTheDifference.
Because computer programmers are mostly male.
Add to that list Morgan Freeman and Stephen Fry.
And for emergency alerts, Brian Blessed.
I've listened to a couple of librevoice recordings from gutenberg, and I think that the real reason is that women, generally, like to read books more than men, so they get the idea that they would like volunteer to read for an audio book as well.
But, they're volunteers, not professional voice actors, so everything comes out as some kind of sing-songy poem read for kids. It's not that women are worse at voice acting than men, it's just that in the amateur reading department there are more of them. The male volunteers have been just as bad. To the point that I prefer my computer's voice to the volunteer readers.
Of the professional recordings I've heard, there haven't been any done by women, so I guess that would be potential flaw in my logic. They've all been superior to machine-readings though. I suspect if I listen to enough, the professional women will do just as well. Now, I just need to figure out how to get the Overdrive app to not get pre-empted by iTunes when I plug my iPod into my car's iPod link....
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Although I like Leonard Nimoy much better, I - have - noticed - a - similar - style - in - his - delivery.
DYIIIIIVE!!!!!
That doesn't mean 'only hang out with dudes', it means 'don't screw over your friends to get laid'.
Who is JEJ? I Googled it and got a zillion hits, but nothing obvious.
JEJ? The voice of "Darth Vader".
:)
Oh yes. Very soothing!
But hey, maybe that works for a library.
Patron:"I swear! I'll pay my late fees by the end of the week!"
Automated Voice:"I hope so for your sake, the Head Librarian is not as forgiving as I am."
Reminds me of Conan the Librarian.
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.
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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.
Your question is answered, and your theory doesn't quite fit:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/health/HealthRepublish_1428081.htm
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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.
So you're like the others here, and prefer James Earl Jones...
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