Comment by jolmg
6 years ago
> 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.
> I don't believe anyone actually thinks like that
You'd be surprised. The world is vast and gender roles are traditional in many cultures.
It's one thing to subscribe to gender roles traditional to your culture, but a totally different thing to base your attitude towards women on the perceived gender of a virtual assistant on your phone.
You can kind of make a logical link if you try, but I don't believe that's how it plays out in reality. It'll possibly be more relevant if/when these virtual assistants become indistinguishable from humans and perhaps have a physical form.
1 reply →
I'd say there's a big difference between someone consciously thinking in a certain way, and building associations, many of which they don't notice. In fact, it's been one of the principal aims of psychology, sociology and economics to uncover how people act on such opinions without knowing they actually hold them.
"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