Comment by deleted_account
6 years ago
"Technology companies often choose to gender technology believing it will make people more comfortable adopting it.
Unfortunately this reinforces a binary perception of gender, and perpetuates stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress.
As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.
Q is an example of what we hope the future holds; a future of ideas, inclusion, positions and diverse representation in technology."
If technology is needed to create this kind of voice -- IE it's not really natural, and as others have suggested it creates an uncanny valley of voice that confuses people, wouldn't that actually perpetuate the idea that there is a gender binary?
(I don't have a dog in this fight, I just don't see that this accomplishes what you want it to)
Yes. You find contradictions all through this kind of belief system if you analyse it logically, because it's driven first and foremost by how people feel (or how people think others might feel).
The analysis of the social construction of gender is not derived from "feelings."
This technology is actually quite inconsistent with gender studies, which is why I find it quite baffling. Gender as an identity would imply that a female could have a deep gravelly voice and that a man could also have a higher pitched softer voice, as ones gender identity need not be dictated by their born sex or physical attributes.
This is quite fundamental to gender studies, making this tech not just useless, but completely counter intuitive to that project.
> stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress
What stereotypes would this help to alleviate?
> the technology we create should follow.
Why it's a service that communications via artificial audio. Why is it important that you can't have a male or a female voice? People still exist, the voices in question don't have a physical appearance.
> What stereotypes would this help to alleviate?
Though I don't feel strongly either way, my guess is that, since people usually leave software on defaults and female voices are typically chosen for voice assistants, the stereotype might be of women being servants.
That seems to me like a far reaching problem to solve. I don't believe anyone actually thinks like that, I think this hypothetical issue exists in the minds of people trying to solve it.
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"Female voices do however appear to have an advantage in that they can portray a greater range of urgencies because of their usually higher pitch and pitch range. An experiment is reported showing that knowledge about the sex of a speaker has no effect on judgements of perceived urgency, with acoustic variables accounting for such differences."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14965452
> As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.
People who neither identify as male nor female AND want to listen to a gender-neutral voice seems like a very niche market.
Society still views gender as binary.
it is an interesting idea. technology of course has no gender, and any synthesized speech can only express an arbitrary simulation of gender, so making this explicit reveals the underlying reality that all technological simulations of gender are by definition constructed. a piece of art that demonstrates the construction of gender probably will not catch on well as a product though.
I instantly recognized the voice as M2F, before it even confirmed that by the description of how it was created. If I had a device with this voice, I would feel a strong urge to reenact the final printer scene from the movie Office Space.
Companies want their voice-enabled products to be purchased. Revulsion doesn't help.
Am I the only person who thinks that the text above is some elaborate kind of trolling?
This sounds incredibly sad and dystopian.
And silly, too. Regardless of what is going on inside a person's head (which we can choose to respect, absolutely), biologically there is definitely just two genders. You can identify however you like, modify if you wish, but in the end your body will be one or the other, right along with your voice.
Gender is not a biological concept, period; that's sex. Your body is also distinctly not "one or the other", given that a large portion of the world is born with one of several intersex conditions.
> a large portion of the world is born with one of several intersex conditions
No, a very very small portion. Gender doesn't vary independently from sex, you'd be hard pressed to find a stronger correlation. It's misleading to consider them as totally separate things.
I figured someone would try to bring up malfunctions. No, DNA is pretty clear on the whole male/female thing. Malfunctions are just that.
Redefining gender is an uphill battle. I won't wish you good luck in doing that, I'd prefer coming up with a new term for this goal.
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> Your body is also distinctly not "one or the other", given that a large portion of the world is born with one of several intersex conditions.
What sort of "intersex conditions" are large portions of the world born with? What do you mean by "large portion?" Like 50%? 30%?
Happy to follow a link if you don't want to type it out and would rather paste a URL
One can espouse such opinions freely and openly but alas disagreeing in any sort of way would often be unwise from a career and public profile perspective.
Ahh, so delusion