Comment by chicob
6 years ago
I was expecting something sounding like whispering, or Wookie, or maybe a child. It sounds a lot like a woman to me. Perhaps in the lower frequencies it sounds like an older male teenager.
To be quite frank, I think the goal is quite dehumanizing and I don't see how this helps, really.
If fighting racist stereotypes and prejudice is not achieved by means of avoiding the issue, why would it be any different with gender? Aren't simple respect for the other and fostering a culture of dignity the true goals?
Our brain's lock-in heuristics will always find a way to reinforce contrasts so that we can navigate the social world. If not gender, something else. What is needed is conscientiousness.
I love to quote Beauvoir's plato page [1], which is particularly well written I find (emph mine), and relates very well to what you've just brought up:
"Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type. Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir’s argument for equality does not fall into this trap. She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. Equality is not a synonym for sameness."
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
EDIT: from an artistic point, imagining what a sexless voice would sound like is an interesting project !
Anyone citing platos republic do so with great disservice if they don't mention that it use satire as a mechanism for political commentary. Below is a few quotes and extracts from plato's republic, and just imagine this being spoken with a straight face.
The guardian class is a selected breeding program where the best women and best men exclusive breed with each other, and any deformetives or lower quality personage got put in an “unspeakable and unseen place”.
When a child is born it get immediately taken from the parent into the hands of breeding pens to be trained into protecting and valuing the collective community above all else. The breeding pens is located in a certain section of the city and apart from the guardians in order to preserve equality and avoid personal possession from the parents.
The children, being pre-destined to participate in wars, should accompany and observe the guardians in battle as “spectators of war”. The involvement of the children in war serves as an opportunity for the Republic to instill a sense of patriotism to the state and admiration of the mighty Guardian class. They should help out and serve in the whole business of war.
To sum up: We are talking about Eugenics, genocide, removal of personhood and individualism, extermination of the concept of family, and creating child armies from the elite. This in a time period where nobility, monarchs, family and arranged marries was the focus point of high society, and the bulk of armies came from lower classes. It is about as subtle political commentary as Monty Python, which is why drawing conclusions such as "the price of women’s admission to the guardian class is that they must live like men" is supported by very loose ground. At best it is just show the cultural assumption of connecting war with masculinity, and at worst asserts that personhood and individualism is feminine.
That's a wonderful point; I need to get around to reading Beauvoir.
I tend to agree, it sounds more like a woman's voice to me. I guess some people will hear a man's voice. It will be like "the dress is blue/yellow".
Case and point, this is probably not perceived as "neutral" but either male or female, which kind of defeats the point.
As a side note, it doesn't feal natural at all, which is a big downside in term of acceptance.
In term of objectives, I consider the fact that the vast majority of vocal assistants have female voices more of a symptom rather than a cause, specially since they are not (yet) ubiquitously used in homes. It's more indicative of deeper issues in our societies regarding gender equality. On a very simple level, it's a basic reflection to the fact most human secretaries and assistants are women.
I would love to see as many voice assistants using male voices as ones using female voices. Jarvis in the "Iron Man" series kind of proves this can be done. Pushing for a neutral voice is more of a band-aid.
There are languages, ie cultures, where iphones default to male. Since it is not random, the assumption must be that market studies and tests has shown a male voice being favored in those countries vs a female voice in other countries. It more than proves that a male voice can be used as default.
The discussion of which gender the voice assistant defaults to can basically be distilled down that people rating the experience of using the female version higher or lower than the male version in specific cultures. The question is why people of some cultures are biased towards a female voice, while other countries are biased towards a male voice.
I think there is nothing wrong with dehumanising and degenderising computer assistants, they are neither human nor do they have gender.
We tend to think making computer interfaces appear human makes it easier for us, but I disagree. We have to remember we are not talking to a person, but a thing. It has no feelings, no real personality and no way to interpret what we're saying other than a series of orders.
What strikes me as odd is the objective of making the interface more human-like in some dimensions but less in others. Like you say, no one's talking to a human, but a thing. Users should be aware of that whichever the case.
And I should add that the onus of not perpetuating vicious stereotypes should fall on the shoulders of the users, not the designers. It seems to me that the idea of ever needing a genderless voice assumes that people are the passive victims of some evil ether that permeates their demeanour.
This is not to say that the project is not interesting - trying to capture the essences of human speech is quite a noble endeavour in itself, and it makes us more in touch with who we are.