Comment by gregknicholson
6 years ago
There is no problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female; what's the problem with some other voice assistant sounding genderless?
> It just sounds wrong, and I can't quite say why.
Maybe you're used to all people sounding male or female, so sounding like neither seems unfamiliar.
> There is no problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female; what's the problem with some other voice assistant sounding genderless?
This is literally the whole problem. It's less that it's genderless in a robotic sense and more that it's a hybrid manipulation of actual voices. It just sounds wrong.
> Maybe you're used to all people sounding male or female, so sounding like neither seems unfamiliar.
Maybe so. We try to make our robots imitate humans, so of course they sound male or female. From what the website said, it might also be flipping between. But even if I am just used to it, so what? That's how I'd prefer my voice assistant to sound, if I ever got one. It's nobody's place to tell me what I should prefer, or say I need to get some creepy-sounding thing just to be woke.