Look no further than examples of automated or artificial-intelligence voices in sci-fi movies and TV shows. “It’s something Hollywood has known for a long, long time.” Then they invite focus groups to listen to the recordings and rate the voices on how well they convey certain attributes: warmth, friendliness, competence and so on. Most companies that produce automated voices hold auditions for voice actors and collect recordings of them speaking. “Cultural stereotypes run deep,” said Nass, who details the BMW episode in his book. One notable exception has been Germany, where BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on its 5 Series cars in the late 1990s after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman. This may explain why in almost all GPS navigation systems on the market, the default voice is female. When automakers were first installing automated voice prompts in cars (“your door is ajar”) decades ago, their consumer research found that people overwhelmingly preferred female voices to male ones, said Tim Bajarin, a Silicon Valley analyst and president of Creative Strategies Inc. And telephone operators have traditionally been female, making people accustomed to getting assistance from a disembodied woman’s voice. According to some sources, the use of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women’s voices were employed in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots. The fetuses showed no distinct reaction to their father’s voice, however.Īnother answer lies in history. He cites a study in which fetuses were found to react to the sound of their mother’s voice but not to other female voices. Research suggests this preference starts as early as the womb, Nass said. HAL, the homicidal artificial intelligence in "2001: A space Odyssey," may have scared manufacturers away from male automated voices. “It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.” “It’s a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.” Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women’s voices more pleasing than men’s. The fuss over Siri’s sex also raises a larger question: From voice-mail systems to GPS devices to Siri and beyond, why are so many computerized voices female? Her gender has even prompted some users to flood blogs and online forums with sexually suggestive questions for Siri such as “What are you wearing?” (Siri’s baffled response: “Why do people keep asking me this?”) People describe the app using female pronouns. Siri answers questions in a part-human, part-robot voice that’s deep, briskly efficient and distinctly female. To most owners of the new iPhone, the voice-activated feature called Siri is more than a virtual “assistant” who can help schedule appointments, find a good nearby pizza or tell you if it’s going to rain.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |