Tech Firms Have An Obsession With 'Female' Digital Servants (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Alexa, Tay, Siri, Cortana, Xiaoice, and Google Now. These technologies all have one thing in common -- they are digital servants aimed at a mass-market audience that feature a "female" voice or persona. And it's not just the voice or persona of the digital persona we interact with that is biased. The results of those interactions also demonstrate male favoritism. It took Apple more than four years to fix Siri's responses to questions about abortion services, and yet the company didn't seem to have any problem programming Siri to search for prostitutes and Viagra. Here's the gender breakdown for the tech workforce of each company:
Microsoft: 83.0% male, 16.9% female
Google: 82.0% male, 18.0% female
Apple: 79.0% male, 22.0% female
Amazon: 61.0% male, 39.0% female

Comments

*TRIGGERED*

[Sigvatr]

*TRIGGERED*

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Anonymous Coward]

Now imagine the shrill cries of favoritism if all these assistants were male voices. Offendatrons really like looking for things to be angry about.

Relax, tumblrinas. If there's one thing you can count on it's that these things will be configurable very soon and you can finally get that Macho Man Randy Savage voice telling you: "You've got mail... YEEEEEEEEAAAAH"

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[gl4ss]

bullshit article for bullshit times.

why? because if it were all male voices then the same fucking story would be posted but with a twist that women are stupid so you can't use the voice for an assistant.

besides than that, you can change the voice - and the company men/women ratios seem pretty healthy considering that the tech university I went to had like 10 women per 100 men in the relevant to google/apple/ms fields.

oh and the irony that if they hire women assistants even if they have nothing for them to do then the numbers look "better"..

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually most automated voices are female because a female voice is easier to hear against background noise. Outside of the traditional tech area from this article I can think of two more I hear on a daily basis. The parking ticket machines where I park my car and the next station announcement on the public train that I catch. Male, deeper, voices would be much harder to hear against the background rumble of the city. This applies to any technology where a use case is mobile.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[sonamchauhan]

Its the use-case that matters. All these assistants are 'speak' close to your ears. Your ears also receive predominantly 'bassy' background noise, as you mentioned. A higher pitched sound is different enough to be more easily isolated from the background buzz.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[stjobe]

Actually most automated voices are female because a female voice is easier to hear against background noise.

Nah:

Early human factors research in aircraft and other domains indicated that female voices were more authoritative to male pilots and crew members and were more likely to get their attention. Much of this research was based on pilot experiences, particularly in combat situations, where the pilots were being guided by female air traffic controllers. They reported being able to most easily pick out the female voice from amid the flurry of radio chatter.

More recent research, however, carried out since more females have been employed as pilots and air traffic controllers, indicates that the original popular hypothesis may be unreliable. General human factors wisdom now indicates largely that, either due to current culture or changing attitudes, an automated female voice is no more or less effective than a male voice.

Edworthy and colleagues in 2003, based at Plymouth University in UK, for example, found that both acoustic and non-acoustic differences between male and female speakers were negligible. Therefore, they recommended, the choice of speaker should depend on the overlap of noise and speech spectra. Female voices did, however, appear to have an advantage in that they could portray a greater range of urgencies because of their usually higher pitch and pitch range. They reported an experiment showing that knowledge about the sex of a speaker has no effect on judgments of perceived urgency, with acoustic variables accounting for such differences.

Arrabito in 2009, however, at Defence Research and Development Canada in Toronto, found that with simulated cockpit background radio traffic, a male voice rather than a female voice, in a monotone or urgent annunciaton style, resulted in the largest proportion of correct and fastest identification response times to verbal warnings, regardless of the gender of the listener.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[Anonymous Coward]

Stand outside that nightclub with a thumping bass. Have someone near you play a bass guitar softly. Have someone near you play a triangle softly. Assuming you aren't drastically hearing impaired, which would you hear better over the background noise?

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Rockoon]

I know you mean well but your post illustrates why this is still an issue.

No it doesn't. You are just leaping to that conclusion, for obvious sjw reasons.

If the ratio of women to men at your university is so low, aren't you interested to know why?

Sigh.. the ratio of men to women at his university is the opposite of what you think. There are surely far more women than men overall enrolled as students, they just didnt enroll in the classes that he is talking about. Now because you are a simpleton sjw alarmist you took what he said to mean the worst possible and most inclusive thing, rather than the best possible and least inclusive thing.

See, now you predent to care about knowledge.. after all, you ask "arent you interested to know why?" yet it is you that repeatedly demonstrates the least knowledge on these sjw subjects. Didn't you know that women enroll in colleges are far higher rates than men? You've been told before... so I guess your version of knowledge is highly selective, just like its supposed to be in a simpleton sjw alarmist..you are a tool of people that arent interested in knowledge.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[silentcoder]

Definitely the bass because if I see someone with a triangle I am punching him in the face before he can play that abomination.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[zeveroare]

Because they are all taking gender studies instead of STEM-field studies. So they can point out the fact that more women need to be employed in STEM without actually doing anything about it themselves. Obviously. And what Rockoon said. The worldwide trend is: The gender gap at universities: where are all the men? The other narrative is ofcourse far more popular.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[johnsmithperson123]

There are more women than men at most universities but they seldom study anything useful (no offense). It's college for college's sake. If you want to get more women in 'STEM' you could start by killing Gender Studies.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Kartu]

If the ratio of women to men at your university is so low, aren't you interested to know why?

Literally interested or "don't you feel urge to try to have 50/50 ratio"?

There are next to no men working in Kindergartens, aren't you interested to know why?
There are next to no women in construction industry, aren't you interested to know why?
There is monstrous wage disparity between genders in modelling industry, aren't you interested to know why?

The problem is, recalling your earlier comments, I think you are interested neither in items that I've listed, nor even in your own example.
Because, it seems that you have decided on "why" long ago, namely that it is because one gender is suppressing another in some way is the only explanation you have for such disparities
What makes things worse worse, you only care about certain gender, but not the other - which is actually quite inconsistent with the idea of equality.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Anonymous Coward]

There are next to no men working in Kindergartens, aren't you interested to know why?

I already know why. Because any man working in a kindergarten is automatically suspected of molesting children. Never mind that women are just as capable of molesting children, and such cases do exist. Just the thought of having an adult penis in the same room as a bunch of children...

In some places, a man working in a kindergarten is not even allowed to do his work without at least one woman present to make sure that he doesn't molest children.

No wonder that men avoid such jobs.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[stealth_finger]

There are more women than men at most universities but they seldom study anything useful (no offense). It's college for college's sake. If you want to get more women in 'STEM' you could start by killing Gender Studies.

No one seems to mind Gender Studies is mostly filled with women though.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[thinkwaitfast]

aren't you interested to know why?

No. That is what I spent seven years taking math classes instead of anthropology classes. I'm not saying it's not an interesting question, rather it's one that I'm not interested in.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[Wycliffe]

There are more women than men at most universities but they seldom study anything useful (no offense). It's college for college's sake. If you want to get more women in 'STEM' you could start by killing Gender Studies.

If by "nothing useful" you mean elementary education, early childhood development, nursing, and medicine then I would agree with you but otherwise you're full of it. I've never met anyone who majored in gender studies but I do know a ton of women that go into feel good majors that are vital to society and help people but unfortunately don't pay well.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[whimmel]

Last I checked my phone does not have a 15" subwoofer. I can more easily hear the higher pitched voices simply because my phone is better at producing them.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[jsh1972]

For those of us that destroyed their hearing on their youth with loud music and working around loud machinery i can assure you a higher pitched voice is much more intelligible in a typical outdoor urban environment. It's just easier to perceive the differing timbres and transients present in speech in a higher register, bassy voices just sound muddled.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[AmiMoJo]

There are next to no men working in Kindergartens, aren't you interested to know why?

Indeed I am. Research suggests it is mostly due to negative stereotypes and only somewhat unfounded fears of being suspected of paedophilia.

There are next to no women in construction industry, aren't you interested to know why?

Indeed I am. I haven't had much time to look into this one though so I'll refrain from speculating.

There is monstrous wage disparity between genders in modelling industry, aren't you interested to know why?

Indeed I am. I'd say this one is less about employment and more about the portrayal of women in fashion and advertising, and the way much of it tries to make women feel inadequate as a way to get them to buy things.

Because, it seems that you have decided on "why" long ago, namely that it is because one gender is suppressing another in some way is the only explanation you have for such disparities

Incorrect. It's more of an institutional problem. There isn't some giant conspiracy where men actively seek to keep women down (MRAs and neomasculine devotees don't have that kind of power or popularity), it's just a legacy of millennia of history. There are individual people who have problematic behaviour, but they rarely operate in a vacuum and it's more important to look at the reasons why.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[pla]

why? because if it were all male voices then the same fucking story would be posted but with a twist that women are stupid so you can't use the voice for an assistant.

Worse than that. Most (all? Honestly never heard of "Xiaoice") of those services let you change the voice, with several male options available - And even when people do change them, they still pick a female voice.

You can debate the societal implications of that, but don't blame Apple/Amazon/Microsoft/etc for supplying exactly what their market asked for.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[NotDrWho]

because if it were all male voices then the same fucking story would be posted but with a twist that women are stupid so you can't use the voice for an assistant.

When dealing with SJW's, the only winning move is not to play.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[RedK]

So you know better than gl4ss

Man, the simple mindness continues.

To make it 100% clear, gl4ss said :

"In this particular field, I see 10 women for 100 men"

Amimojo said :

"The overall ratio of men and women at your university".

This is how things like the Wage Gap myth get started. Someone makes an observation about a niche or specific field, Internet Slacktivists blow it up into a "Applies to everyone, all the time" scenario.

In STEM, the ratio of women to men advantages MEN. In University in GENERAL, there are more women enrolled than there are men. There are more women graduating than men do.

It can be BOTH. And to answer Amimojo : No, we don't particularly care to know why women don't enroll in STEM, we assume it's because they aren't interested. The ones that are interested enroll and that's good enough for us.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[0xdeadbeef]

If the ratio of women to men at your university is so low, aren't you interested to know why?

We already know why, women experience stereotype threat and they're more sensitive to the social stigma society attaches to nerdy pursuits.

It's not a problem for most of us, so we don't care, and we shouldn't have to. Only women can fix themselves.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[Ol Olsoc]

I've never met anyone who majored in gender studies but I do know a ton of women that go into feel good majors that are vital to society and help people but unfortunately don't pay well.

And that is not even bad. If the accumulation of money is the measure of happiness or success, perhaps, but if having an actual purpose to help others is the measure, who has done better?

Anyone should be able to go into any field they wish. This doesn't mena that there will be no gender differences in the fields.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[RedK]

People call you a SJW not because they disagree with you, but because you're an Internet Slacktivists who uses Social Justice to do Virtue Signaling, while constantly responding in an attempt at damage control in all these Gender/Race baiting article comment sections.

SJW is a pejorative for a bunch of blowhards who talk a lot of smack online, but don't do much IRL about Social Justice. And the posturing they do online is more sexist and racist (Color blindness, learn it, stop asking for seggration of "minorities" in "Safe spaces") than the "bigots" they are attacking.

Make a reasoned argument, not just concern trolling, and people will stop calling you a SJW. BTW : you'll have to accept meritocracy and human agency, so you'll have to accept that not everything needs to respect population quotas. STEM having 90% male is not wrong, as long as it's a choice made by all involved parties.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[Wycliffe]

Then why all of the whining about "wage gaps"? If women are majoring in genuinely useful things, then there should be no "wage gap". If there is such a thing, perhaps it points to some attempt by SJWs to over value certain professions despite clear market forces that indicate otherwise.

Women are majoring in genuinely useful things but when men primarily optimizes for money while women optimizes for things like happiness, family time, helping others, and group cohesion then there will always be a wage gap. My kids are a perfect example. They share the same box of legos and watch all the same movies but my daughter has a small village of doctors and nurses taking care of animals while my son has spaceships and weapons. My son also wants to build legos in a room by himself with no interaction with other people while my daughter wants it to be a social event where everyone builds something together. My daughter is more geeky than my son and loves programming, fishing, and chess but there is still a very social aspect to all her activities that is missing from my son. We are dealing with thousands of years of evolution where men were competing with each other and women were working together for the common good.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[lgw]

Of all of Slashdots user base (UIDs are up to, what, 3 million now?) you are one of about 3 who I'd call an SJW. There's a reason people keep calling you that - you in particular.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Rockoon]

Mea culpa, I should have said the ratio of men to women in CS, not in university in general.

Finally stand tall?

The rest of my point stands.

No, it doesn't. Your point devolves into cherry picking the smaller disparity in spite of the larger one. Don't you want to know why so many more women are in college? Why do you only care about a rather small subset of this where you can call foul on the opposite disparity?

(see my sig for what I think of that)

You've already proven the value of your thought processes. The next sjw story you will again be there waving your hands, making the exact same mistakes. Today isnt the first time you've made these. Hell its not even the second time.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Archangel Michael]

Indeed I am. Research suggests it is mostly due to negative stereotypes and only somewhat unfounded fears of being suspected of paedophilia.

We call that Male Privileged. Nobody cares about that side of things, even you.

Indeed I am. I haven't had much time to look into this

Mutually exclusive statement, rendering the excuse false. If you were interested, you would have ALREADY looked into it. You haven't, so I can presume that you're not that interested.

Indeed I am. I'd say this one is less about employment and more about the portrayal of women in fashion and advertisin

I'd say you don't have a clue what you're talking about so you're winging the answer based upon your own biases.

Incorrect. It's more of an institutional problem. ... it's just a legacy of millennia of history.

Actually, it isn't an institutional problem. It is a Gender difference problem. It is why girls tend to prefer dolls to trucks, and boys tend to prefer trucks to dolls. It doesn't have to do with social norms and other bullshit ideas. The fact is, boys/men are different from girls/women. While there are exceptions to gender preferences, we see those show up in these stats, girls/women don't prefer STEM courses, and boys/men do not prefer teaching kindergarten, but there are some who do.

The great thing about America, which the SJW can't seem to wrap their heads around, is that we are Free to choose, rather be imposed upon by SJW ideals. At least for now. The fact is, "Norms" are that way for a reason, something that obviously offends SJWs to no end.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[AmiMoJo]

We call that Male Privileged. Nobody cares about that side of things, even you.

Um, no, it's the exact opposite of male privilege. In fact this is an example of female privilege, because women are rarely though ill of for wanting to work with children.

That's actually a pretty good example. It's not that women have some advantage, it's just that they are mostly free from a disadvantage that men have. I might use that.

If you were interested, you would have ALREADY looked into it.

I own quite a few books I have not read yet. My time is limited, that doesn't mean I don't want to read them. You are just being pedantic now.

It is why girls tend to prefer dolls to trucks, and boys tend to prefer trucks to dolls.

This is still an unresolved debate. I'd point out that pink used to be a boy's colour about 150 years ago, and blue a girl's colour. At some point it flipped around, as did many other things. Basket ball is more popular with girls in Japan, but not in other countries. Some countries don't play it at all. Many boys like "action figures", which is just another name for dolls.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[RedK]

but there is actually a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Citation Needed.

I'm trying to make a reasoned argument, but you make absolute statements

False, I made a reasoned argument. You are the one making absolute statements. You made the statement it was because one gender is being institutionally repressed, and that it is due to systemic problems and social pressure. And we are supposed to accept that as FACT from you.

There is no reasoning with you, you are the same way on all these discussions. You literally bring the rageposts everywhere you go.

I don't know where the rage comes from exactly.

Look in the mirror. It comes from your polarizing language and you constant demeaning and assault on the current crop of IT/CS engineers, calling them "a problem" (aka, Brogrammer culture idiocy). Stop calling everyone who disagrees there even is a problem "part of the problem", and maybe you'll get more open mindedness.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[Shortguy881]

I'm all for studying the other gender. The homework is great.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Archangel Michael]

Unfortunately you've been bitten by the progressive non-scientific but called Gender Neutrality which views both genders as being the same in all areas, and blaming of culture for corrupting them into gender stereotypes. Here is some scientific articles that you won't read that explain why you are not correct.

http://www.livescience.com/226...

http://www.bustle.com/articles...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5879647...

The problem is, that we tend to take the outlier as the rule, when trying to break norms. We should accept that norms are those for a reason, while not excluding those that are outside those norms. There will be girls who like trucks, and boys that like dolls. Blaming stereotypes solves nothing and doesn't actually progress understanding.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Dixie_Flatline]

Not only did I read them, I read them well enough to pick out the parts that contradict you.

"Wallen approaches the data more cautiously. "It's hard to interpret what the looking data mean because we don't know why people are attracted to specific things. Clearly children recognize that certain objects in their environment are appropriate for certain activities. They could be looking at a certain toy because it facilitates an activity they like," he said."

"And just because you play with a particular toy doesn't mean you only interact with it in a certain way. Dolls can be made to race, and trucks can be cuddled and carried around. Toy preference alone doesn't tell the whole story. So when it comes to girls, boys and the toys that want to play with, any generalizations are murky at best."

"Also, the researchers suggested a social rather than biological basis for the behavior. Because regular stick-carrying hasn't been reported in other wild chimpanzee communities, they proposed that that young Kanyawara chimpanzees may be learning the behavior from each other as a way of practicing for adult roles – a form of social tradition passed between juveniles previously described only in humans."

Oh no! It seems that the science isn't quite settled here! It seems that socialization DOES have an effect! It seems that while NATURE ISN'T NOTHING, NUTURE HAS MORE OF AN AFFECT THAN YOU GIVE IT CREDIT FOR. See, that's the thing I said before.

Keep it up, chum. Maybe one day you'll find someone that accepts links as proof without reading them better than you do.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[ncc74656]

In Star Trek, the voice of the computer is Marina Sirtis.

Majel Barrett, actually, for both TOS and TNG...and according to Memory Alpha, all the way through to the 2009 reboot. You can hand over your geek card on the way out the door. :-)

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Kartu]

It doesn't really contradict what ArchMi said, it just doesn't exclude other possibilities. What you've cited was at best "but there could be other reasons". Well, there could be. Possibly.
But that's exactly what people often labeled as SJWs do: claim/imply that the only explanation to gender disparity is discrimination/suppression. Yet it looks like not only "not the only", but even rather unlikely explanation.

I guess you missed the following part:

"The striking thing about the looking data shows that the attraction to these objects occurs very early in life, before it's likely to have been socialized."

This piece makes "social basis" argument look rather wrong:

Further buttressing the idea that toy preferences are caused by hormones, last year, a group of British researchers found that girls with a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who experienced abnormally high levels of the male sex hormone androgen while in the womb, prefer to play with male-typical toys.

http://www.livescience.com/226...

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Hashead]

Oh no! It seems that the science isn't quite settled here! It seems that socialization DOES have an effect!
No, it's settled. Boys are more interested in things, girls in people, and this is not due to socialization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Social Justice people like to think that it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to determine to what degree nature and nurture influence behavior, and advocate that we must take the position that we can manipulate everything by socialization, since we can't know for sure wether it's determined by nature, nurture, or a combination of both. It's essentially shifting the burden of evicence.

In fact, it's pretty easy to determine what is innate, and what is learned. All you have to do is look at the variation across cultures. The behavior that varies is socialized, while the behavior that remains constant across cultures is innate. Boys prefer things, and girls prefer people, across all cultures. There are several other such differences we can observe.

Stepping back a bit, based on what we know about sexually reproducing species, we should certainly expect there to be many innate differences. Men and women, like all living things, are optimized for reproductive success. That is, behavior that increases fitness ( read: produces successful offspring ) is selected for.

Thing is, men and women reproduce VASTLY differently. Since womens reproductive potential is capped by biology, she can only grow so many offspring in her lifetime, while mens potential is capped only by access to mating opportunities, it follows that men and women will act differently. Men will display behavior designed to maximize their access to mating opportunities, while women will act in ways that maximize her ability to raise her offspring. Let's remember that a really smart ape is still an ape.

If men acted like women, being more choosy about who they copulate with, that would be detrimental to their reproductive success. Likewise if women acted like men, and tried to have sex with as many men as possible, that would be detrimental to her reproductive success because such behavior will produce less fit offspring. You can point to bonobos, and a couple of other exceptions in nature, but these species evolved in very specific and unusual environments. Bonobos have no natural predators, and have easy access to food, which is a rare luxury in nature. Their sexual behavior is just as much biologically hardwired as chimpanzees'.

These predictions fit perfectly with observations we can make. Men and women do in fact behave this way, in all cultures. There is no culture where these roles are reversed, so claiming that this behavior is "socially constructed" makes no sense.

HAL

[Edis Krad]

Make it HAL's voice and I'll switch it right away. Specially if after searching for something it didn't find it, it said. I'm sorry (Your Name), I'm afraid I can't do that .

Re:HAL

[butzwonker]

That's an extremely relevant remark. The word "Zeigzeug" is so much more precise than "blinker".

Female voices are easier to understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Female voices are easier to understand. This has been known for decades. It has nothing to do with exploitation. As if you could even exploit a computer program in the first place.

Re:Female voices are easier to understand

[havana9]

I recall that some experiment was made by telephone companies, for landlines, and despite the fact a male voice, being lower in pitch could be sampled at a lower bit rate, a female speaker was more intellegible when sampled at 8 kHz and passed via a telephone.

Jarvis

[jxander]

Make it happen.

Alternate hypothesis

[stoborrobots]

Alternate hypothesis: users respond better to female digital voices. Most GPS units and previous IVR systems feature female voices.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[Anubis IV]

Another hypothesis: this is an imaginary problem, since Siri debuted with a male voice in other regions (e.g. UK and France) and is capable of being changed to either male or female voices in all or almost all major regions. I haven't checked, but I'd assume the same is true for Google Now and that Microsoft and Amazon are likely working on the same thing too. At best, there may be an argument that this is an American cultural issue, but suggesting it's a general tech industry problem would require that we ignore the obvious evidence to the contrary, namely, that these products aren't female by default for all users.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[SeaFox]

Alternate hypothesis: users respond better to female digital voices. Most GPS units and previous IVR systems feature female voices.

Ha. It's not even a technology thing. Why are the majority of personal assistants and receptionists in meatspace women, too? Even when men apply to those jobs the person they hire if more likely to be female.

Looks like a case of coders simply following human behavior.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[TheReaperD]

The problem is not so much the default voice option but, the fact that these services don't have a general feedback/report issue function for the general population so it relies on the company techs to find and correct issues until something gets big enough that the media is contacting the companies. When the general workforce is 75% or so male, that directly means that any issue that affects just men are three times more likely to be detected and corrected than an issue that affects just women, with things the affect both being detected and corrected the most frequently. When executives ask the teams why a female specific topic wasn't corrected, the most likely, and most likely honest, answer is "it didn't come up." That just unintended consequences of having a non-diverse workforce rather than any maleficence.

Social justice clickbait

[Jiro]

See subject.

Re:Social justice clickbait

[AmiMoJo]

Actually, it's anti-SJW bait. There is no article, it was posted anonymously and it's worded to trigger the anti-SJWs around here. Someone is trolling Slashdot, but I don't think they are really trying to promote social justice at all.

When I occasionally post social justice stories I always try to word them in a non-confrontational way and am careful not to lay blame on individuals or groups when the problems are institutional, as they are with the workforce ratios. Maybe it wasn't the intent of the poster to put it over this way, but they did.

Why do they need to politicize ***EVERYTHING***??

[Taco Cowboy]

What the fuck is wrong with having robots with female voice?

Please tell me the rationale of politicizing *everything*, including digital servants having female voices?

We in the tech field are focus on inventing, we really don;t give a fuck on whether those SJW like what we do or not

If they don't fucking like what we do, go invent their own digital servants and STOP BOTHERING US

I am fucking fed-up with those assholes!!!

I mean, we are not talking about some 'sex toy' or some 'porno-gadget', we are talking about digital assistances with female voice

Re:Slashdot

[ArmoredDragon]

I think the dumbest part of this is that the preferred gender of the voice tends to go by cultural norms rather than the company that made the damn thing. Middle eastern cultures, which are by far more male dominant than even the most male dominant tech company in the US, will either get offended or pissed off (or both) if a female voice gives them directions.

In western cultures, women are just more culturally inclined to take caretaker (as in medicine, grade school teacher, babysitter) or assistant type jobs (for an anecdote, my uncle's family is really into computers, and all three of his boys are going into tech related jobs, but his daughter wants to be a dentist even though she's had the same tech exposure that they had.)

Re:Slashdot

[BeauHD]

... and whiny users commenting about other whiny users -- it's a paradox. Welcome to the internet.

This, it's marketing basics

[s.petry]

Women have better voices for marketing, plain and simple. The majority of commercials have female voices for the same reason these "robots" (sorry, I don't consider them robots) do.

Certain female voices are hard on the ears, but the range of woman's voices considered pleasant dwarfs male's.

TFA misses that basic information and jumps right to the typical rants about discrimination, which have been verified false over and over and over. Social engineering does not like or want facts, they want to manipulate. So far, they are doing just that because the populous does not fact check anything. Even those that claim to be scientific use bias at least as often than facts.

Re:This, it's marketing basics

[khasim]

Siri also has a male voice option. I have a friend and that's the option she chose.

Re:This, it's marketing basics

[ArylAkamov]

Nice of the summary to skip over that and go straight to SEXISM

Re:This, it's marketing basics

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing dumber than that particular breed of leftist who constantly searches for things to get offended over, is the new type of radical rightwinger who paints every effect he doesn't like as a result of leftism. You people are both boring.

There is a reason the "Bitching Betty" is not the "Angry Alan" and that is that pilots are mostly male. Males respond more to a higher pitched voice such as a woman's than a man's and when it's time for Betty to speak, you typically really NEED to hear that message. It has nothing to do with niceness and it has just as little to do with any galloping leftism in online culture.

The whole world is not against you just because some morons on twitter and tumblr get their tits in a twist about imagined slights.

Re:This, it's marketing basics

[serviscope_minor]

Really? Because I'd pay good money for a digital a assistant voiced by either Brian Blessed out Mister T.

Re:This, it's marketing basics

[wickerprints]

I have heard this claim repeatedly made and used as justification for a wide variety of things ranging from why voice guidance in GPS systems are invariably female by default, to why women's voices are preferred in radio advertising. Yet I see little or no solid scientific research to back up the claim. I am frankly skeptical, because (1) female voices seem to me to be just as diverse as male voices; (2) ethnicity and language seem to play a huge role; (3) the perceived sexual attractiveness of a voice clearly is a confounding variable.

Even if it were true, it doesn't mean that the default should always be some cooing female, especially with a synthesized voice which can easily be modified to sound androgynous. That, I suspect, is more a reflection of the personal preferences of the system's designers than it is a decision based in science.

Just to conclude with an unscientific and personal anecdote, I've noticed that I sometimes find the sound of female voices when they are socializing to be extremely grating, more often than I do with male voices. There is of course no shortage of instances of either sex being loud and obnoxious over lunch or dinner, but for some reason, I find the sound of female voices to get very piercing and the manner of inflection to be particularly cringe-inducing.

The user chooses the persona

[GrahamCox]

At least with Siri, it's up to the user what "persona" (or more specifically, which voice) you choose. I would assume that the other similar services are user-customisable. The entire premise of the article is bogus.

Re:Amazon

[phizi0n]

Because the majority of Amazon's employees work at their warehouses and have nothing to do with tech.

Re:Amazon

[Njorthbiatr]

It's nowhere near close to gender population of qualified coders.

What we have here is discrimination against men.

Slow news day

[realjordanna]

From 2011 http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/...

Re:Amazon

[phizi0n]

Amazon's actual numbers here: https://images-na.ssl-images-a...

"PROFESSIONALS" = 74.5% male
"TECHNICIANS" = 88.8% male

"LABORERS & HELPERS" = 54.6% male

Soon the bots will even make the sandwiches.

[dsmatthews9379]

Meanwhile in my household the systems that I set up sound like an slightly bored English butler (male) and that is the way everyone likes it. Who knows what is going on with the tech companies, why didn't they give people a choice?

More stats!

[kuzb]

Here's the breakdown of my level of care over tech workplace gender equality:

0%

Women who want to work in tech are not prevented from doing so, which is evidenced by the fact that they do happen to work in tech. Progress past the mythical problem already - it doesn't actually exist.

Abortion services and hookers are different

[91degrees]

A lot of people feel incredibly strongly about abortion. If Siri gets a false positive when it thinks someone wants an abortion, Apple are in the PR shitter.

Re:Abortion services and hookers are different

[91degrees]

Since when is Apple a law enforcement organisation?

I was talking about the PR nightmare. This means public relations. This means that if they screw this up then it could result in Apple selling fewer phones. This is what Apple cares about.

Now, perhaps you aren't aware of the situation in the US, but that is a country where there are a large number of strongly religious people who believe that abortion is a sin. The US has, as part of its fundamental law, the right to freedom of religion. This means that these very religious people will make a lot of noise if a company seems to be supporting something they see as sinful.

These people also buy Apple products. Apple wish to sell iPhones to these people as well as moderate liberal minded people.

Re:Amazon

[tsotha]

I'd be surprised if that didn't mirror the applicant pool.

Maybe they watched Star Trek

[Anonymous Coward]

All of these services are basically trying to copy the experience of the Star Trek computer, except replace "Computer" with "Ok Google" or "Alexa" or some other distinct and easy to recognize 3-4 syllable phrase.

The computer in the Star Trek series has a female voice, so to those who dream of making a reality out of science fiction, that would be a natural choice.

Re:Voice emulation

[TheReaperD]

I'd switch it to Christopher Walken for your alarm just for the fun of it. And maybe set it to whisper to you in your sleep for good measure.

Re:Amazon

[Aighearach]

They are clearly higher women who are less qualified.

I think clearly you're even higher than they are.

99.9%, 101%

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that's bothered by the fact that Microsoft's breakdown adds up to not-quite-100% and Apple's breakdown actually adds up to more than 100%? Who's doing this math anyway?

Re:lies, damn lies and statistics.

[serviscope_minor]

Hey you can't do that, you're comparing apples to ora.. uh googles.

I thought the same

[MrKaos]

To alleviate the issue, I recorded the phrases for my wife's car navigator but I changed the 'left' and 'right' audio with the much more helpful 'it's coming up' and 'you just missed it'. I re-recorded the 5, with a 3 and the hundred with 'just there, fuck it's right in front of you' - That way I no longer have to assist her in person - the machine does that for me and it's like I'm in the car actually being helpful.

Higher pitch voice *are* easier to hear

[DrYak]

Actually most automated voices are female because a female voice is easier to hear against background noise

Yup. There's even research supporting that (If I wasn't lazy, I could dig a few refs).

Although lots of culture consider deep male voice to be signs of authority, it happens that our ears are better tuned to hear our mothers (whose voice in turn has also evolved to be better heard).

So in a way, evolution has been clearly matriarchal for that specific characteristic of vocal communication.
Head monkey's voice sounds cool but is basically understood as "Yadda-yadda". It's mom's voice you should be listening at.

SJW could maybe stop over-reacting and ponder a bit the implication of these point of views.

(Also, think about all the GPS giving orders in imperative form using by default a female (higher pitched) voice pack.
- That's as far as possible from the "servile" position that is criticised in the summary
- Don't you think these firms have done the necessary litterature review and determined that it's the best voice for noisy environment)

Quite Opposite

[DrYak]

Thats exactly why hunter-gatherer languages are full of high pitched tongue clicks: prey cant hear the hunters talk because the sound stops at the first tree.

So high pitch is the frequency range we have evolved to communicate with.
- both the ability to express (clicks, consonnants and hisses)
- and the ability to hear (our ear do cover the necessary range)

Explain me again how this is an argument, against using female (higher-pitched) voices ?
How your explanation of physics contradicts the parent poster that higher-pitched voices are better heard ?

Ever walk past a nightclub ? Notice how you can usually hear the bass drum through the walls but not the rest of the music ?

(BTW, your explanation is incomplete. The dominance of basses isn't only due to the diffusion being proportional to 1/f . It's also due to the way how different material conducts different frequency ranges. Few night club are completely in the open).

So you've (more or less) successfully demonstrated that most noise that get the farthest and dominates the most is low-frequency.
Given all this low-frequency noise, please explain me again why you think that the parent is wrong in proposing that a high pitch voice (say a soprano - high range female) would be better heard against such low-freq noise than a low pitch voice (bass - low range male) ?

If you are going to attribute something to the laws of physics you should probably know what they are first.

If you're going throw around science in your reply, maybe you should pay attention of this peculiar field called Psychoacoustics.
It's science, it works and it's what nearly every modern audio compression algorithm runs on.

GPS imperative

[DrYak]

because if it were all male voices then the same fucking story would be posted but with a twist that women are stupid so you can't use the voice for an assistant.

Also note that most GPS speak by default using a female (higher pitch) voicepack, and are clearly giving order using imperative forms to the driver.

That's not exactly what I would call subservient.

Re:GPS imperative

[Mr D from 63]

Why would the author of this article call a female voice that helps people a 'servant'. That seems kind of sexist and demeaning to me. Is is OK now to refer to people, including women, who work on help lines 'servants'?

Let's review...

[hyades1]

I was around at the dawn of desktop computing. I learned our office had an Apple 2E. It had sat on a shelf for a year before I got there (first job), because nobody wanted to bother with it. I figured out one of the two disks it needed to load was damaged. I got another one. I figured out how to run Appleworks, integrated word processor, spreadsheet and data base programs. On my lunch hour, I went to bulletin boards to learn how we could take advantage of all that bookkeeping, mailout, and information tracking power.

For my trouble, I was condescended to and ridiculed by the female office staff as a silly little boy playing with his silly little toy. Then our little non-profit organization started to punch 'way over its weight. Guess why.

Somewhere along the way, I noticed that virtually all the helpful responses I got on the bulletin boards came from guys. So I wondered whether this was universal. At that time, it was no big deal to get the membership of a BB. So I did...for 15 local ones. And I assigned all the names that were obviously male to one column, all that were female to another the results were so utterly one-sided I compensated. Who knows...maybe some women were afraid to identify themselves, though at the time there was no compelling reason not to. So I assigned all names like "Kim" and a lot of "foreign" names (where I couldn't be sure what sex the person was), to the female side.

I came out with more than 90% male bulletin board membership. So just about everybody trying to figure out how to use this new office tool effectively was male, at least in the Toronto area.

There was no coercion, sexism or even fooling around. Back then, communication via BB was just too slow and disjointed to bother with that kind of thing. People needed advice, and those who could give it were quite generous.

So now it's a new world, and women are complaining that people about my age, who have made their way up the corporate ladder in computing, are mostly male. If my experience is anything to go by, the reason has a lot less to do with sexism than with the fact that quite a lot of us back then were "silly little boys playing with our silly little toys". Now those toys are running the world, and the girls who couldn't be bothered to give up lunch in order to figure them out aren't well represented at the top.

I'm aware that my evidence is anecdotal, but my numbers with respect to those dawn-of-time bulletin boards is 100% accurate.

Re:Let's review...

[silas_moeckel]

The ones that were unwilling to embrace change got left behind regardless of gender. This is a good thing. SJW think everybody should get promoted just to be "fair". Life is not nor should it be that sort of fair.

Re:Slashdot

[Viol8]

"There's nothing honest about your attempt to discuss this issue."

SJWs arn't interested in discussion, they only work with polemnic.

Re:What we need

[RabidReindeer]

Actually, I think that there was a study back in the 1960s that determined that a woman's voice was more intelligible in an environment where there was a lot of background noise.

Plus, there's the possibility that people might be less inclined to abuse or outright destroy "female" machinery when they get frustrated with it.

Re:What we need

[jbmartin6]

I thought this was interesting so I searched around a bit and it seems this idea has been dis proven. Wired had a piece also. Some interesting tidbits in there like "For example, women’s speech includes more personal pronouns (I, you, she), while men’s uses more quantifiers (one, two, some more). If someone listening to a voice interface hears a male using feminine phrasing, they are likely to be distracted and distrustful. "

Re:Awful big stretch there

[nospam007]

"Here's the gender breakdown for the tech workforce of each company:
Microsoft: 83.0% male, 16.9% female
Google: 82.0% male, 18.0% female
Apple: 79.0% male, 22.0% female
Amazon: 61.0% male, 39.0% female

What in the fuck does this have to do with digital servants?"

Well, as you see Microsoft has apparently 0.1% transgender workers while at Apple, there's 1% superfluous males waiting to get sacked and none of the writers of the summary used Siri nor Cortana to do the math.

its partly audio science

[laurencetux]

there have been a couple studies done that point out that higher pitched voices (ie "female") tend to be understood more by people.

Re:Why do they need to politicize ***EVERYTHING***

[Stinky Cheese Man]

Please try to keep up...

Where men are over-represented, they are "dominating the field".
Where women are over-represented, they are "being exploited".

It's not that complicated

[RogueWarrior65]

It's a mostly male field of employment. Further, it's a mostly male nerd field of employment. Male nerds generally have trouble dealing with the opposite sex. It's always been that way. Female digital agents satisfy a small part of their desire to communicate with the opposite sex.

Weren't female voices more pleasing to humans?

[denzacar]

And more effective in getting humans to follow instructions?
While also more effective in establishing an emotional connection with the brand?
Haven't we figured that out already? Like... years ago?

It's what the market wants

[firewrought]

Consumers prefer female voices. Crying wolf on sexism and racism does nothing to help society address the real inequalities these protected classes face. Jeez... it's almost like these SJW-types are running a false flag operation to tarnish the advances that the last century of feminism brought to society.

The word "obsession" is an especially bothersome bit of hyperlobe. If these companies were truly obsessed with female servants, Siri/Cortana/etc would display OS-tan-style maid animations with easter egg prompts that convince them to go ecchi, complete with deferential titles for their user (master, mistress, -sensai, -sama, etc.). That's what obsession would like... not just a few cherry-picked search results.

well duh

[TimMD909]

Having a male voice would support the patriarchy. It would show that women's voices should be silenced in technology. We can't have that.

Do they even have a gender?

[green1]

I know Google Now doesn't have it's own gender. I have my choice of both male and female voices, and it doesn't have a "persona" that indicates either way. In fact when I chose UK English for Google Now a couple of days ago, it defaulted to a male voice.

Even if they had chosen a female default, that's just plain good science. In many surveys of both genders, it has been found that the majority of both males, and females, feel more comfortable talking to a female sounding computer than a male sounding one. That's not because the tech firm is "obsessed with female digital servants", it's because the population at large prefers it, and they are catering to their customers.

This is another attempt to look for, and stir up, controversy where none exists.

Stupid fucking article

[JohnStock]

Sorry for the very low brow, low intelligence remark, but "fucking stupid article" perfectly fits on this occasion.