
Meet Q, a Genderless Voice - deleted_account
https://www.genderlessvoice.com
======
chicob
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.

~~~
globuous
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/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/)

EDIT: from an artistic point, imagining what a sexless voice would sound like
is an interesting project !

~~~
belorn
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.

------
crazygringo
I was very curious to see how this sounded.

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]

[1] [https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01/language-
pitch.html](https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01/language-pitch.html)

~~~
exelius
To be honest, it’s not really all that unusual once you start paying attention
to it — plenty of women have deeper voices than mine.

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.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> 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:

[https://pbfcomics.com/comics/automatic-
business/](https://pbfcomics.com/comics/automatic-business/)

~~~
exelius
I wouldn’t say it’s particularly exaggerated; the “gay voice” is basically
male pitch ranges with stereotypically feminine prosody and/or alliteration (I
don’t say this as a mockery at all; there’s a documentary on Netflix that goes
into the origins of this).

Though I do agree that gender norms are largely cultural — but it doesn’t
change the fact that a Spanish man sounds “gay” to most Americans.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Though I do agree that gender norms are largely cultural — but it doesn’t
change the fact that a Spanish man sounds “gay” to most Americans.

In that case, talking of a certain vocal style as being masculine or feminine,
without a cultural qualifier, is meaningless. You should clarify that "this is
how men speak in the US" or some such.

I don't know if I'd take a Netflix documentary as evidence that a stereotype
is accurate.

~~~
exelius
There’s ample SLP research and documentation on all of this and I think you’re
battling a straw man.

Edit: also your edit is just plain offensive. You have no idea what you’re
talking about.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I deleted my edit not because I agree that it is offensive but because it goes
into personal detail that I find unnecessary.

Also, I discern in your comment the start of a certain aggression in such
conversations that I find, frankly, disturbing. There is absolutely nothing in
my comment that is addressed to you, personally, yet yours is becoming
personal. To protect myself from what this can lead to, I will not contribute
to this discussion any longer.

------
MisterTea
Hmmmm, I think there is more to gendered speech than pitch or frequency. It's
about subject and delivery. Anyone a fan of The Venture Bros.? Dr Girlfriend
is a female character voiced by a male actor (Doc Hammer) Although the given
voice is that of a woman with an incredibly exaggerated smokers voice; think
patty and selma from Simpsons multiplied by each other. The characters voice
is obviously male but the delivery is effeminate which is why it works so
well. At least I always heard it as a very exaggerated voice of a woman who
smoked heavily.

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.

~~~
purple-dragon
> … a very obvious gay male flight attendant

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.

~~~
afiori
This is indeed a complex theme, in part because how it is linked to negative
stereotypes and in part because people might not realize they are sometimes
reinforcing the negativity in them.

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.

~~~
purple-dragon
If I can say it another, simpler way: I decide when and what I do with my body
and what that makes me. No stranger’s perception nor insistence can change
that. However, repeatedly being subjected to such judgements over subconscious
or natural expressions of behavior, whether voice, gait, etc., is a vehicle
for psychological harm, much like gas lighting.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
You can absolutely decide what you do with your body, but what it makes you is
not solely your decision. Like it or not, what we are labeled as is partially
determined by what society thinks we are.

Here is an extreme example to prove this. I can say that I am a chair, and I
can argue this until I'm blue in the face, but that won't change the fact that
others will think that I am a human, not a chair. More relevant to the
conversation, let's say I am a man that only has relationships with other men.
I can call myself straight all I want, but if I tell other people about my
behavior, they will categorize that behavior by the behavior(homosexual), thus
it will not always align with the categorization that I apply to
myself(straight). Okay or not, it is human nature to behave this way.

~~~
purple-dragon
That’s my point. You can call me gay all day, every day because of my
hypothetical lisp. That doesn’t make it so.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Sure, but I was more responding to your post above saying "I decide when and
what I do with my body and what that makes me. No stranger’s perception nor
insistence can change that." The perception of others does affect a persons
categorization. Humans also categorize based on stereotypical behavior of
things within a category, eg. lisp and swaying gate in gay men, long hair and
lowered muscle mass in women, etc. These are all stereotypes that are found in
a higher density within those categories, and often people within those
categories change their behavior to align more with those categories(women
intentionally growing hair out and wearing makeup) to accent category
projection and improve accurate category interpretation in others(that is a
woman). In this way, stereotypes aren't always prejudicial, it's more of the
rigidity of the category interpretation that makes something bad, such as
saying all men with lisps are gay, which is wrong.

I know this is quite a bit, but the main point I'm trying to make is that
there is nuance in this conversation. Categorizations aren't always
evil(though they can be), and are important social signals in our society.

~~~
purple-dragon
I mostly agree, but it is lazy, sloppy, and unnecessary to combine “gay” and
“flight attendant” at the hip as multiple people have done in this post.

As for deciding “what that makes me”, I was trying to obliquely save room for
the case another poster brought up, namely being gay or bisexual.

------
b_tterc_p
Sounds female, usually, but clearly wavers between male and female. Primarily
though it sounds unpleasant to me. Not a fan.

~~~
Yver
This is [uncanny valley][1] applied to voice. They intentionally made a voice
that listeners can't quite identify, and it ends up feeling unnatural.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

~~~
dmix
This view of the future seems very bland and uninteresting.

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?

------
macinjosh
If we really want a genderless assistant voice bring back the novelty voices
from Mac OS X like Zarvox, Pipe Organ, and Cellos.

[https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=186](https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=186)

~~~
gregknicholson
A non-human voice is a valid goal, but a human non-gendered voice is a
different thing.

Please recognise that agender people are both human and genderless.

------
oldgun
I mean no offense, but how is this really solving any problems? How is
inventing a new voice many people are uncomfortable with really making the
world a better place? A user configurable male/female voice could just work.

~~~
BenFrantzDale
The idea, I think, is that it matters that/if we gender our digital
servants—that as we use them more it will affect our sense of gender rolls.
That Siri and Alexa are both female by default puts them in the stereotypical
female-secretary roll.

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.

~~~
seventhtiger
I mean, to really address this problem, don't we need genderless employees in
the workplace?

~~~
gregknicholson
We already have them. I'm agender and I'm typing this from my workplace
(during lunch).

The response to this AI voice demonstrates that a lot of people automatically
hear any human(ish) voice as either female or male, one or the other.
Similarly, people automatically recognise individuals as either female or
male, one or the other. There's a very narrow band of presentation that _won
't_ be read automatically as one of those two options.

See how difficult it is to stop your brain from making automatic (possibly
false) assumptions.

~~~
seventhtiger
To be honest I don't understand what being agender means. I respect whatever
presentation and choices you make for yourself even if I don't understand it.

I just don't think things having gendered presentation is an issue. There are
many languages with a female sun, male moon, female Earth, male oceans, and so
on.

I don't think making assumptions that are true of the vast majority is
necessarily wrong. What's wrong is reacting negatively and rejecting someone
like yourself who doesn't wish to participate in the concept of gender, and
that's cool, but communication based on gender is still efficient in most
cases.

------
mises
I'm not sure I see the problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female,
and I certainly wouldn't buy this. It just sounds wrong, and I can't quite say
why. I guess after all the work tech companies have put into trying to sound
like a person, this deliberately doesn't.

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.

~~~
kazinator
> _it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower._

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".

~~~
mises
> it also sounds like a high pitched male

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.

~~~
exelius
It actually does sound like they tried to blend multiple voices. It sounds
very tinny and robotic; and not particularly non-gendered imo.

~~~
kazinator
It does, but that is deceptive. Voice is determined by the pitch of the vocal
tract and the spectral filtering caused by its shape: the "formant". Both can
be manipulated digitally to create different voices.

I do perceive that there are abrupt transition in the voice as you move the
so-called frequency slider; that could be due to abrupt changes in some
parameters (like table lookup from a small table keyed to the frequency
parameter or something).

------
diss
Surely you'd refer to this as a "sexless" voice. Even if you believe that
gender and sex are unrelated, voice is a product of your physical body and
determined by sex. It's not affected by gender. In my opinion all this does is
highlight that the "he or she" mindset is an unavoidable part of our reality,
which is presumably the opposite of the intention.

~~~
Pfhreak
Gender, ie cultural context, does in fact play a role on how we speak and both
the pitch and intonation of how we speak.

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.)

~~~
diss
Slightly, but what we consider male and female voices are correlated with sex
and not gender. This is apparent in almost any transexual person, unless they
happen to have an androgynous voice or physical alterations to their vocal
cords.

~~~
qntty
Seems like it is affected by both, no? Transgender women tend to speak
differently after they begin to transition.

~~~
diss
And yet it's more often than not recognisable as a male voice. But anyway,
they're not changing their gender, they're changing their sex. They will tell
you that there were of the female gender before transitioning.

------
feikname
Interesting concept, but it sounds slightly female to me.

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.

~~~
jpindar
I've heard it's not just the average pitch that varies; female voices also
tend have a wider range of pitch. In other words most men speak in more of a
monotone than most women. Whether this is biological or cultural, I don't
know.

------
chomp
It sounds feminine to me. I predict that the truth is in the ears of the
beholder, and subconscious bias will cause people to sense a more masculine or
feminine voice.

~~~
robotron
I agree, perception probably plays a lot into this. It seemed mostly feminine
to me but wavered a lot between what I perceive feminine and masculine voices
are. This doesn't seem like the answer but I agree with whoever created this
in that it would be nice to have non-gendered computer voices. My reasoning is
just that I don't want to give machines a fake gender - it's something that's
always bothered me. That thing is not a him nor a her.

------
phaedryx
Hmm, I wonder if "genderless" will be more distracting than a clearly male or
female voice. It seems unnatural.

------
sureaboutthis
> I'm created for a future where we are no longer defined by gender...

That's not a world I want to be part of.

~~~
throwaway875u58
The key word there is defined. Defined by gender means boxed in by the
expectations that being a male or female thrusts on us.

Ergo, that sentence sounds like someone is asking not to be boxed in by their
gender.

Why is that not something you can support?

~~~
kuzehanka
> The key word there is defined. Defined by gender means boxed in by the
> expectations that being a male or female thrusts on us.

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.

~~~
ravenstine
Even a world where everyone can be defined by one of 75+ genders wouldn't be
preferable, as the concept would lose all meaning and be just as bland in it's
amorphousness. Gender is fundamentally tied to the expression and perception
of biological sex, which allows it to have a meaning that goes beyond the
self; genderlessness, and gender a la carte, are all about the self, not the
greater society around it which depends on sexual signaling.

I have been a sort of outsider all of my life, but I don't think the extreme
catering to the undefined individual is the best thing for humans as a group.
If anything, it makes us more atomized, and I have yet to be convinced that
individuals tend to happier when they have been maximally individualized.

People should have the freedom to not identify with gender, or want a gender
neutral voice assistant, but I don't see how a genderless society is
preferable.

------
kazinator
That pitch control isn't really controlling musical pitch. It seems to mostly
moving the peak of a band-pass filter. The actual change in pitch is very
slight.

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.

------
pedalpete
It came across to me as slightly more feminine, I moved more towards the 140hz
range to make it sound more gender neutral to my ears.

~~~
jolmg
I don't know, I thought it was pretty spot on. I thought 140hz sounded
consistently male.

------
blhack
To those asking: the problem with gendered voice assistants is that they are
almost always female. The argument is that this trains people to think of
women as subservient, or things to be ordered around.

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.

~~~
collarzoon
> The argument is that this trains people to think of women as subservient, or
> things to be ordered around.

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.

------
qwerty9876
Sounds like an average 14-year-old squeker who's in the middle of puberty
hurling out insults in a video games voice chat.

------
raehik
Great, but there's a whole bunch of languages out there differentiate between
male and female spoken language. Bit disappointed that it doesn't mention
anything regarding that.

------
ars
Another vote for the voice sounding like a deep voiced Female.

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.

------
zapzupnz
It doesn't sound genderless to me, it sounds like something that just fails to
be both male or female.

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?

------
antt
Typical meatbag voice. The future belongs to formant synthesis, I can easily
get to 1000wmp without any loss of coherency and the sound is fundamentally
inhuman.

[https://ufile.io/9905a](https://ufile.io/9905a)

~~~
gugagore
I didn't quite catch that...

~~~
ctoth
It's intentionally made to be hard to listen to. OP spliced multiple copies
together with a slight offset, varied the rate while recording, and
intentionally selected a passage which repeats very similar words in
proximity, which further increases the difficulty.

> 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.

~~~
ctoth
Well either that or Espeak has broken something badly with their rate boost
because wow, that's pretty terrible.

~~~
antt
Standard espeak at 1000 wpm on the setting I put on the other comment.

eSpeak NG text-to-speech: 1.49.2

------
Akinato
Huh. Cool, but I'm not really sure what problem it solves.

~~~
i_am_nomad
It doesn’t solve a problem, it’s just not “problematic.”

------
leifg
I like the idea and I'm glad there is effort being put into this.

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"

------
peterwwillis
Recently, United Airlines decided to allow for a non-binary gender option for
booking flights. All the comments on social media were people screaming about
how the liberal agenda was coming to get them, how there's only two genders,
get over it, etc. "What, am I supposed to guess if that's a man or a woman
sitting next to me now?!" But nobody is forcing these people to pick a new
option. They can just select the one they've been selecting their whole lives.
It literally does not affect them at all. But they still have an irrational
hatred for an irrelevant option.

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.

------
j00pY
It sounds female to me, but I like it. It sounds like something out of a ships
computer in a sci-fi film.

------
BenMorganIO
This is really good. I've been raising the voice from up and down to go from
make to neutral to female and then let it drift in and out. I feel like that
was the best. It was great paying attention to familiarity while also getting
neutral.

------
davidhyde
Sounds like a South African accent and a recording (or several) at that. Then
some filters.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
That doesn't sound like a genderless voice. It sounds like a mix of gendered
voices. You move the pitch up and down to make it sound more "male" or
"female", and it's supposed to sound "genderless" when it has an equal mix of
both. You can clearly hear the different voice strands superimposed on each
other, like a sort of chorus.

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.

------
fenwick67
This is awesome. My computer shouldn't need a gender. It's a computer.

~~~
dchest
A computer is a masculine noun in two of the languages that I use.

~~~
kaybe
I'm sure you can find plenty of synonyms where it's feminine.

~~~
dchest
Indeed, at least in Russian the original term ("electronic calculating
machine"),which was used before "computer" was adopted, was indeed feminine.

------
nonsince
The number of people saying that this voice sounds absolutely female is just
an extension of the tendency to imagine anything even slightly deviating from
the most stereotypically masculine as feminine by default. The one comment
that I saw comparing this to a masculine voice was comparing it to a "gay
flight attendant" that they had on a flight recently - and there, again, is
the tendency to assume someone's gay just because they deviate slightly from
the stereotypically masculine. The voice sounds genderless to me.

~~~
thraway-burnout
Or maybe because it kinda does sound like a gay flight attendant.

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

~~~
purple-dragon
It’s disappointing to see you pull out such an easy, cheap, and tired
stereotype.

~~~
thraway-burnout
So there are no gay flight attendants? There isn't an overrepresentation of
gay people within flight service?

I didn't say all flight attendants are gay – this is obviously not the case.
But some are, and I've met quite a few of them. And if I try to average out
their voice and mannerisms in my mind, it leads me to a sonic place that's
close to this voice.

~~~
purple-dragon
We’re not talking about the same thing. There are likely gay people in nearly
every occupation. That you think you can tell by their voice is ignorant and
prejudicial.

~~~
i_am_nomad
One probably can’t tell that with 100% precision, but the brain is a fantastic
statistical prediction device that is specifically wired to make deep
inferences from vocal patterns. I would imagine the correlation between “gay”
vocal characteristics and actual homosexuality is close to 1.

------
KickTheKidS
It seems that most people don't really like the way this sounds, but honestly
I had the opposite response. I despise the 'natural' sounding synthetic voices
because there always seems to be something off about it. The fact that this
sounds so weird is what I appreciate about it.

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.

------
piyush_soni
Even when I move the frequency near the perceived male area, it _still_ sounds
female to me. There's more to voice than frequency alone.

------
Adamantcheese
It sounds like a poor attempt at voiceover editing. It's nasally and monotone
and dull and dreary. There's this strange vibrato throughout it all and there
are sudden rapid shifts between a really low and high tone of voice. I'd
honestly much rather have something blatantly robotic than this almost
successful voice, because all I feel is that I'm being played for a fool.

------
qmanjamz
This is a solution in search of a problem. The overwhelming majority of people
do not care what gender their digital assistant's voice is.

------
jscholes
Gender issues aside, speaking as a daily text-to-speech user this voice
doesn't sound particularly natural or pleasing. The accent seems to constantly
shift between American and British, and there is some weird audio phasing
going on. It sounds more like a Hollywood director's idea of what robots
should sound like than something I'd actually want to listen to.

------
zawerf
This reminds me of the audio clip where you can flip between whether you heard
Yanny or Laurel:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-
clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html)

------
self_awareness
Sounds like female. Plus, even when I drag the bubble to the bottom, it also
sounds like female but with an additional filter on it.

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.

------
tmcw
The Hacker News crowd is very concerned about people "inventing something that
doesn't need to be invented" when that thing strays anywhere near social and
cultural issues rather than a shiny new startup or web framework.

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.

~~~
orangecat
_just google 'alexa female' and you'll get plenty of articles to read_

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.

~~~
brenschluss
> Generally from those who have decided that their job is to find ways to be
> offended by everything.

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'?"

~~~
TeMPOraL
Keep in mind that a lot of the offense-taking you see happening publicly is
done entirely on purpose. Think of it as adult/Internet equivalent of a child
throwing a tantrum to see if they can manipulate their parents into getting
what they want. In both cases, bowing down to the threats is not the right
answer.

------
bitwize
It sounds like a deep female voice, not just in terms of frequency but timbre;
perhaps a transwoman who has undergone a _lot_ of voice training. Even
deepening it into the male range didn't eliminate the female timbre.

Colossus (from _Colossus: the Forbin Project_ ) arguably had a more genderless
voice than this.

------
Uhhrrr
What problem does this solve?

~~~
deleted_account
"Technology companies often choose to gender technology believing it will make
people more comfortable adopting it.

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."

~~~
overgard
If technology is needed to create this kind of voice -- IE it's not really
natural, and as others have suggested it creates an uncanny valley of voice
that confuses people, wouldn't that actually perpetuate the idea that there is
a gender binary?

(I don't have a dog in this fight, I just don't see that this accomplishes
what you want it to)

~~~
diss
Yes. You find contradictions all through this kind of belief system if you
analyse it logically, because it's driven first and foremost by how people
feel (or how people think others might feel).

~~~
cazum
The analysis of the social construction of gender is not derived from
"feelings."

This technology is actually quite inconsistent with gender studies, which is
why I find it quite baffling. Gender as an identity would imply that a female
could have a deep gravelly voice and that a man could also have a higher
pitched softer voice, as ones gender identity need not be dictated by their
born sex or physical attributes.

This is quite fundamental to gender studies, making this tech not just
useless, but completely counter intuitive to that project.

------
ravenstine
It sounds like the creepy female changeling from Deep Space Nine but with a
slight British twang.

------
nmstoker
It's the least gendered synthetic voice I've heard but there is still a slight
wobble between being first a hint more male and then a hint more female.

Also seems to me like it's somewhat camp - a neutral voice in that regard
would also be worth exploring

------
sabalaba
It sounds a bit like a vocal Necker cube illusion. (I.e. I find myself
swapping between either male or female depending on how I am listening to it.)
It's a bit like the Yanny/Laurel thing for me where I hear both.

------
undoware
I'm a big fan of this, as a non-binary trans woman. Also, it sounds like me ^^

~~~
kkarakk
no offense meant - no one sounds like this. record your voice and play it back
side by side. there's some kinda uncanny valley effect at play

~~~
undoware
you're literally telling me what I sound like. that's one hell of a splain

~~~
kkarakk
splains is hard job

~~~
undoware
anything with the statistical frequency of splaining is unlikely to be
terribly difficult work

------
tacone
Next up: vocal synthesis of males and females replying in chorus.

------
cagenut
this is really cool. my personal reaction was to feel it was a little odd and
off, but as I moved the Hz meter up and down it went from "oh a womans voice"
to "oh a mans voice" pretty clearly. that is just plain interesting to know,
I'd never seen how clearly quantifiable and single-axis that distinction can
be. I bet if i spent a few weeks or so using a device in those Hz ranges i'd
get used to it.

------
kkarakk
Meh, as soon as assistant got it i switched to a masculine voice. it's still
pretty reedy, i'd like something like terry cruz's voice baritone

------
tokyodude
That's not Pat?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl](https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl)

~~~
dbg31415
Yeah, I don't quite understand what the goal of this voice is.

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4hqUxb9MmY)

------
dsego
Sounds like a transgender or queer male person.

------
hndamien
I would have thought a deep learning approach trying to fool a classifier
would have been a more politically neutral approach.

------
rocky1138
This is neat, but I don't care if my AI's voice is genderless. I'm fine with
whatever. I usually pick female.

------
habosa
This actually worked for me. Sounded like the gender could go either way and
the voice was pleasant enough.

I'd install it.

------
floatboth
Sounds awesome.

But calling something "Q" is a weird choice, considering a recent conspiracy
theory

~~~
mbel
Can you elaborate to which recent conspiracy theory are you referring to?

~~~
floatboth
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon)

------
egypturnash
I'm on Safari and I hear nothing. I guess silence is ungendered?

------
i_am_nomad
Sounds more feminine than Elizabeth Holmes, in any case.

------
mrankin
That doesn't sound like John de Lancie at all!

~~~
pndy
While we're at this, I'd rather prefer that my virtual assistant would be
based on Majel Barrett-Roddenberry voice she used in ST LCARS voice (?)
interface. Pretty sure she did record enough lines to synthesize her voice.

------
pitchas
Sounds like a strong, independent lesbian

------
CryptoPunk
This reminds me of Harrison Bergeron, a story about a dystopian future where
any inequality is brutally suppressed.

------
cfv
Nope, sorry. US politics have made me develop a reflex disdain for anything
new named like that.

------
black-tea
This sounds fine to me. I don't care if a clearly artificial voice doesn't
sound human. Computers should have their own voice.

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".

------
undoware
I would humbly suggest that the bevy of reactions to this innovation that
amount to 'eww ugh this creeps me out' is evidence of precisely the
cisheteronormative bias that this voice was designed to mitigate. I invite you
to introspect about your (dis)comfort around folks who are gender-
nonconforming.

------
sparkling
Imagine being triggered by your GPS devices voice

Grow up

------
7e
This voice sounds like a third gender to me: trans.

------
sdinsn
Can we not pretend that a computer generated voice in a specific frequency
range is some sort of political statement?

------
thraway-burnout
I rather a female assistant voice, because mothers in human societies are
women, and we're hard-wired to find motherly voices more soothing.

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.

~~~
stdbrouw
It's just a voice. You can dislike it without having to get worked up about
it.

~~~
thraway-burnout
But it isn't "just a voice", isn't it?

It's part of a socio-cultural Zeitgeist which actively combats values which I
think are worth defending.

------
gonational
If I could bring somebody here from anywhere between 100 to 10,000 years ago,
to show them the absolute state of society...

------
caprese
This is a good step

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.

