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."
(I don't have a dog in this fight, I just don't see that this accomplishes what you want it to)
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.
People who neither identify as male nor female AND want to listen to a gender-neutral voice seems like a very niche market.
Companies want their voice-enabled products to be purchased. Revulsion doesn't help.
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.
I find something offputting that so many agents pick a female voice (e.g. Alexa, Siri)
A human has to be in the recording booth to create the vocal library. Also you can change the Siri voice to not only be Male, but also have a different accent.
Its research based, not merely "sexism":
https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/tech/innovation/female-comput...
One could argue that a computer assistant should have a human-like voice and an overwhelming majority of humans have distinctly male or female voices.
If you're not sure what problem it solves, just google 'alexa female' and you'll get plenty of articles to read, and, hopefully, consider.
Generally from those who have decided that their job is to find ways to be offended by everything. If Alexa and Siri had male voices by default, I have no doubt that the same people would be complaining that tech bros are erasing the historical contributions that women made as secretaries and assistants.
You know, I never understood why people trot this idea out so often. It's so irrational.
If people were rational, they would say "hmm, X doesn't offend me, but many people say that X offend them; perhaps they have a point."
Instead, only those who are incapable of understanding their own confirmation bias say "All these people say that X offends them; how silly."
I think this is a highly irrational take.
The better take would be: "Some people seem to be offended by everything; other people are not. What are the principal factors of a person that go into predicting 'will this person be offended by X'?"
I was pretty disappointed that all the major voice assistants have female voices and most of them have explicit female personas and names. I find it a little creepy to be honest.
At least Google didn't go for the whole personality crap. They could switch Google Assistant to this type of voice and it'd fit in. You can't switch Alexa to this type of voice while keeping that name.
I don't know what you're reading, but HN is generally highly skeptical of those too, perhaps overly so. This is especially true with your web framework example.
You hear 'genderless' voices every day, which is to say, voices which one couldn't place as being male or female with any reasonable accuracy.
You'd be surprised at who in your immediate vicinity has more or less a non gendered voice if you didn't have all the other 'clues' as to their gender.
In the production of synthetic voices, surely we've come across many which are de-facto genderless already.
It sounds a little bit like the voice of a moppet-type character from League of Legends that just huffed helium. Because it is so stylized you don't have the problem of a "perfect english gentleman" who pauses unnaturally, sometimes makes vowels like T-Pain, etc. that you have with more realistic voices.
It definitely comes across as female to me, but it is cartoony enough that it not so culturally coded as female -- so there is less of a sense of "female servicing" as there is with most voice assistants.
* Soundwave G1 voice compilation part I - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOu3hYXE_tM
As it stands Q isn't genderless it's just gender non-conforming, which is a great alternative but I'd like to see some work into an actual "AI" voice rather than these voice assistants that try to imitate a human on the gender spectrum.
Please recognise that agender people are both human and genderless.
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.
"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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They did a "great" job... for me, it's exactly ambiguous between a high-pitched male voice and a deep-pitched female voice. It's like the old "is it a vase or two faces?" illusion, or "which way is the ballerina spinning?" It keeps flipping in my brain.
But for the same reason, I would never choose it because it sounds so out-of-the-ordinary, an extreme outlier for human voices. When a computerized voice is speaking, I want it to sound "natural" (e.g. common, unexceptional) so that I'm paying attention to the message, not the voice.
Unfortunately a single "gender-neutral" voice turns out to sound quite uncommon, very exceptional. I only know a couple of people who sound like that, out of 1000's. I applaud the intention, but unfortunately I don't think it works in the end.
Regularly or randomly alternating between "average" female and male voices feels like perhaps a better practical solution, matching the two "humps" in the bimodal distribution of actual voice frequencies. [1]
I transitioned from male to female some years back and trained my voice from a deep, masculine voice to one solidly in the female range. Pitch is only one aspect of how we gender speech, and I think that’s why it feels off to you.
I would say this voice uses pretty male-coded speech patterns with a higher pitch than you’d normally hear a man speak in. The pattern of clear starts and stops between words and limited range of pitch used sounds “male” to my ears.
This sounds like an exaggerated stereotype of how men speak. Interestingly, the stereotype is different for men from Southern European countries who are said to speak in a sing-songy voice with vowels flowing together between words like vocal ligatures.
For example, this stereotype is used for satirical effect in the following strip:
Dragging it all the way down left sounds like a woman with a deep voice.
Having an AI-voice sound artificial could be an advantage in certain situation but I doubt that was the goal here.
Also, it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower. Even when I use the little drag thingy to pitch it as low as it will go, it still sounds female. I think most of us know pitch alone doesn't define voice, and that's clear from this.
That’s exactly what I hear. I’m not annoyed there is a market for such frivolous “woke” things, but I am annoyed it seems to be a mediocre attempt at it, it’s entirely female to me.
> 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.
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.
Concentrate harder; it also sounds like a high pitched male.
Basically, for me, I flip flop between two genders. For me, there is no such thing as "genderless" voice, just "gender meta-stable" at best.
Another thing to consider is that adult female voices sound like boy's voices. In animation, boy characters are often acted by women (who aren't doing anything to change their voices).
So "gender neutral" easily has the interpretation of "between boy and man".
I think it sounds feminine in a couple senses, but male in others:
* The speaker speaks less from the chest and more from the throat
* In terms of enunciation, females tend to speak more clearly on sounds such as "t"s, which can be observed here.
* The voice sounds a little more male in that the ends of many words trend lower in pitch, but more female in that they "bottom out" very early in the descent and dip heavily into vocal fry.
* There is less range of tone, which is more characteristically male.
All this aside, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually multiple people. And I suppose the fact that we all disagree is evidence that they're doing something right. But I think most of us can agree it still sounds really wrong in some way.
They are close enough that you don't have to deal with the nightmare that is child talent.
I love the idea behind this, although I don't necessarily agree that they have achieved their goal, but perhaps that says something about me more than it does about the service itself. To me, this still sounds like a female voice, just pitch-shifted.
But isn't that like people who assumed that violent games make people more violent (which was proven false in research)? To me this looks more like pushing some agenda trough from some activists in the gender debate.
However, a pitched-up male voice could have the same frequency content, and it wouldn't sound any weirder than this "neutral" voice.
Sounds like an extraordinary claim going unsubstantiated. Unlike that claim, the reason why voice assistants are overwhelmingly female is well known. It's because both users of both sexes overwhelmingly prefer a female voice in focus groups. That facet of Siri et al has been studied very thoroughly.
I have Waze speak as a British male, of course then he sounds like a stereotypical butler. It would be fun if I could set it to be Batman or HAL9000, but it would probably get old.
Aside from the motivations of the engineers (which are unclear and maybe even irrelevant), I think it's interesting technical work, including taking a stab at gender perception in speech patterns with a bold application.
But isn't this happening only if some marxist is searching for this "problem"? I never considered it this way, until your comment.
It's like with the service OP is presenting... they are offering "solution" to made up problem.
That's not a world I want to be part of.
Ergo, that sentence sounds like someone is asking not to be boxed in by their gender.
Why is that not something you can support?
If you pay close attention, most of the cultural debate over gender identity issues relates not to eliding distinctions and expectations, but to reshaping the boundaries and expectations of those identities.
It's easier to see what I mean by this with the debate over racism and affirmative action. In the U.S. most white people think equality means being "color blind"--so blind that some refuse to even admit that non-overt racism is possible. In truth civil rights in the U.S. has never been about eliding or ignoring [racial] distinctions, but changing expectations. As long as power differentials exist (and they will always exist), these expectations will matter and will constantly shift.
Another way to look at it is that any identity is by definition exclusive. And identities only matter because they imply a default set of expectations. If you say that people should be literally free to choose their identity, you're allowing people to freely reinterpret and redefine the implied expectations and shared _meaning_ of that identity, which can be injurious to those who previously chose that identity. There's an inherent conflict, there. It's why as a white male I can't go around identifying as a black female, certainly not without making substantial changes to my behavior and perhaps even physical appearance, changes that should be consonant with what being a "black female" means. To do otherwise would be another kind of violence.
You can't really understand any of these issues without understanding and appreciating the genesis--power. It's all about power over others. We can never have a society without power differentials because that would imply the power to _refuse_ to recognize the identities others have chosen for themselves. Power matters not because it's per se evil, but how it's used and how it's distributed and what are the concrete results in people's lives.
In adjudicating conflicts over what the expectations for an identity are, one must take into account how power is used and abused and by whom. For example, it's legitimately problematic for a man to argue that transgender women shouldn't be allowed in women's bathrooms because of the threat of violence. It's problematic because it's another instance of a man making decisions about what it means to be a women, and men have historically abused their social and economic positions when drawing these boundaries to disadvantage women more generally. The logic of the argument is secondary to the power politics, because fundamentally it's really about the power politics. It's more legitimate for women to make that argument, and in so much as they do make it it carries more weight (notwithstanding that women as a group are certainly capable of abusing their relative powers), but in actuality they've been less vociferous about it.
The line of thinking that says power differentials are inherently wrong and/or that we should elide the implications of identities are inconsistent. If only things were so simple....
Identity is by definition a set of expectations. To lose those expectations is to lose a facet of identity.
There's a group of people who want to remove that facet of their identity, cool, I support them. But I like that facet of my identity, and I like the fact that most people around me also express that facet of their identity. I don't want want to be genderless or to live in a genderless world. Do not marginalise me for being that way.
My take on the voice? Sorry, to me it's an effeminate male voice. I hear a british woman overlaid with Fez from that seventies show. In fact I was on a flight yesterday with a very obvious gay male flight attendant who sounded very similar to this. Think man's voice with a little helium in the air.
I’m not a fan of these kind of characterizations. I can think of two things that make someone obviously gay: (1) they tell you, or (2) you see that person engaging in homosexual conduct.
Nearly anything else is probably a prejudicial stereotype.
It is not controversial to say that an obvious metalhead is indeed a metalhead.
Also I would like to point out that "(2) you see that person engaging in homosexual conduct" is not that much of a silver bullet here, as bisexual and trans people exist too :)
Also sometime it is not hard to know more someone that they know themselves, I had a couple friends that were known to be gay before they knew themselves. And also "a very obvious gay male" does not mean homosexual to many people, in the last years society and the internet became much more mature in distinguishing masculine/effeminate stereotypes from actual sexual orientations. I have no idea of what went through GP minds, but I believe that being able to separate the "very obvious gay" from a description of a sexual orientation into a personality trait can be very beneficial for society in the long term.
Whether you are a fan of those characterizations or not. It's real.
I thought the idea is to make gender a flexible thing, for example you can experiment with being a female or whatever gender profile, based on whatever you feel comfortable with.
Not to reduce the worlds gender representations (in business, culture, etc) into a homogeneous middle ground? Expanding what's possible in terms of personal expression rather than (further) restricting it. So I'm very confused why this exists other than as an interesting technical project?
> Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using additive synthesis and an acoustic model (physical modelling synthesis. Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components.
The settings for that text snippet were
$ espeak -p 100 -s 1000 -v male7
That's really the optimum for me for speeds over 650 pwm.
You ever hear of upspeak/uptalking? Vocal fry? It's not so simple as just sex driven characteristics. (Although testosterone does impact the development of vocal chords.)
Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
But calling something "Q" is a weird choice, considering a recent conspiracy theory
This is getting out of hand, it's unnatural, fits strictly in the uncanny valley, and is borderline disgusting; both in terms of sound and in terms of politico-cultural values and intentions.
It's part of a socio-cultural Zeitgeist which actively combats values which I think are worth defending.
I wonder what difference is there between male and female voices besides pitch (excluding cultural differences in way of speaking)? If some are exclusively binary, using or not using it will obligatorily lead to one or the other, and if so, a totally "gender" neutral voice becomes impossible.
(I used gender enclosed in quotes because I'm only talking about the general biological differences between male and female voices, not elements such as way of speaking, choice of words, etc)
Maybe one approach could be mix aspects from both male and female voice.
Confident and helpful -- shouldn't that be the aim? Doesn't that sound different for men and women? And across different nationalities?
Q sounds unsure of itself to me... and just weird. I wouldn't prefer this voice to Siri or just about any of the old MacOS voices.
* Mac OS X TTS (Text-To-Speech) Voices - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4hqUxb9MmY
Think about it; if you change the pitch of a note from 100 to 150 hz, that's should sound like someone is singing a perfect fifth interval. Nothing like that is heard here.
Also, if their criteria for recording was what people "identify" as that's not going to help much.
They would need people who are biologically both, hermaphrodites, or neither, neuters (i.e. hormonally castrato). And given that humans are by default biologically female (i.e. without hormones a human becomes female) I'm not surprised the voice sounds female.
Also, their "future" of people not identifying as male or female (I assume they mean that most people would be like that, not a minority) is not a future I desire.
Having males and females makes life far more enjoyable (for most).
The minority where that doesn't work for them shouldn't have a problem with the fact that others are. Anymore than someone atheist should have an issue with someone religious.
People (or voices) don't have to be similar to you in order for you to interact with them.
What I actually find the weirdest is when my ears hear female, it hears something British or South African. When my ears hear male, it hears a more American voice.
So is this just synthesised from two different speakers with different accents?
I imagine though if one of the big players would implement this we would see an insane amount of public debate and media coverage about whether the voice sounds like a man or a woman.
It seems like the typical "tech tries to solve social issues"
If some people want a genderless voice, yeah, I think tech companies should adopt it. If it makes someone more comfortable, and it doesn't harm me in any way, I'm not going to bag on it.
In any case, a blend of male and female is still just a blend of male and female. Genderless should stand for something that is neither male nor female, and I can't really see how you can achieve that by mixing male and female in any proportions.
Perhaps one day we'll have natural sounding voices, but until then I'd always prefer a more artificial sounding voice. Something something uncanny valley, I guess.
When I think about it, I've never heard anyone who is genderless, I've heard only male and female voices, so I wouldn't know how to compare!
The voice itself is well done. I'd use it, but in more "bubble to the top" form.
Colossus (from Colossus: the Forbin Project) arguably had a more genderless voice than this.
Also seems to me like it's somewhat camp - a neutral voice in that regard would also be worth exploring
I'd install it.
I think the stated purpose is stupid, though. Gendered roles are good. They give people a purpose and make them happier. I really pity the little girls who get forced into things like engineering just because their parents wanted to be hip and "genderless".
I've given input on political issues as well as gender issues under multiple identities and personas to gain consensus
Almost no progress on consensus regarding political issues but on some sex and gender issues the male persona was unqualified to "mansplain" or had to much privilege to contribute or complain, where the same information was agreed upon and deemed helpful coming from the non-male persona - assumed to be female
This is more about the decision path people make to discredit a someone. When confronted with information that deviates from your script, people typically look for faults in the messenger instead of the actual information. You look for words that a different party would use exclusively to pigeonhole the messenger as the other, you look for other biases.
I felt that even if an A.I. was created to try to aggregate perspectives and offer its observations, people would try to disagree with it based on who created it. A valid criticism, but what would be left with to offer potentially unifying perspectives.
I like this and I imagine how it can be trained to create a voice that you agree with, but that nobody else would hear.
..... based on your cookies.
Then everybody gets to hear a different voice and mostly the same information - perhaps slightly different words as to not undermine the illusion.
Grow up
