I worked on automation of some of the PA announcements used on railway stations in the UK, e.g. "The next train from platform 4 is the...". These were recorded

I worked on automation of some of the PA announcements used on railway stations in the UK, e.g. "The next train from platform 4 is the...". These were recorded sets of words and phrases that could be concatenated to sound quite natural and the content of most were very dull. Every sound file was recorded in a male version and a female version although the female was used almost all the time. I asked about this and was told the following: * Women respond equally to male and female voices * Men instinctively rebel against petty instruction given in a male voice... unless... * In a threatening situation (fire, football riot etc) orders in a male voice are trusted more I don't know how true any of this really is when applied in the real world, but maybe the similar studies have been applied to conversational interfaces.