23 ms·

Meet Q, a Genderless Voice

pedalpete 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I don't know, I thought it was pretty spot on. I thought 140hz sounded consistently male.
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chomp 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
macinjosh 8y ago
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
- carimura 8y ago
  +1 for whisper.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    Yeah. For some reason it reminds me of S.E. Lain.
    - hex12648430 8y ago
      >For some reason That's because it's the voice used to announce the titles of the episodes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KV84lt9Kho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KV84lt9Kho
- dbg31415 8y ago
  Decepticons, attack! * Soundwave G1 voice compilation part I - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOu3hYXE_tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOu3hYXE_tM
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- PaulHoule 8y ago
  I like the voice "Ivy" from Amazon's Polly. 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.
- whywhywhywhy 8y ago
  Although these are gimmicky the sort of route of approaching the problem from what would a machine or non-human AI voice sound like would actually get you the goal of a Genderless Voice. 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.
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Uhhrrr 8y ago
What problem does this solve?
- deleted_account 8y ago
  "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."
  - maccio92 8y ago
    Ahh, so delusion
  - monksy 8y ago
    > stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress 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.
    - jolmg 8y ago
      > What stereotypes would this help to alleviate? Though I don't feel strongly either way, my guess is that, since people usually leave software on defaults and female voices are typically chosen for voice assistants, the stereotype might be of women being servants.
      - diss 8y ago
        That seems to me like a far reaching problem to solve. I don't believe anyone actually thinks like that, I think this hypothetical issue exists in the minds of people trying to solve it.
tokyodude 8y ago
That's not Pat? https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl
- dbg31415 8y ago
  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
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b_tterc_p 8y ago
Sounds female, usually, but clearly wavers between male and female. Primarily though it sounds unpleasant to me. Not a fan.
- Yver 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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?
- daenz 8y ago
  I had the same experience. I hope this isn't going to spin off more academic work about why our brains are hard-wired to be sexist by continually and automatically trying to perceive the gender of speaker based on their speech.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  I agree. But most of the time it just sounded like the typical deep female computer voice that scifi has used for decades.
Akinato 8y ago
Huh. Cool, but I'm not really sure what problem it solves.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  It doesn’t solve a problem, it’s just not “problematic.”
davidhyde 8y ago
Sounds like a South African accent and a recording (or several) at that. Then some filters.
7e 8y ago
This voice sounds like a third gender to me: trans.
feikname 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
caprese 8y ago
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.
phaedryx 8y ago
Hmm, I wonder if "genderless" will be more distracting than a clearly male or female voice. It seems unnatural.
- daenz 8y ago
  I'm half serious when I say this, but calling it "unnatural" can border on intolerance, for somewhat obvious reasons.
  - zamalek 8y ago
    If we could figure out how to make a genderless voice, then it would be intolerant. This is not a gender neutral voice. It sounds like it's cycling between female-type and male-type voices with a very strong bias towards female-type. I applaud the effort, but it falls very short. The voice itself is intolerant because it's almost a parody.
    - phaedryx 8y ago
      Yeah, I think that's it. If it were consistent it would work much better.
cagenut 8y ago
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.
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qmanjamz 8y ago
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.
mises 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
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- kazinator 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    > 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 8y ago
qwerty9876 8y ago
Sounds like an average 14-year-old squeker who's in the middle of puberty hurling out insults in a video games voice chat.
egypturnash 8y ago
I'm on Safari and I hear nothing. I guess silence is ungendered?
ars 8y ago
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.
undoware 8y ago
I'm a big fan of this, as a non-binary trans woman. Also, it sounds like me ^^
- kkarakk 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    you're literally telling me what I sound like. that's one hell of a splain
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      splains is hard job
      - undoware 8y ago
        anything with the statistical frequency of splaining is unlikely to be terribly difficult work
sdinsn 8y ago
Can we not pretend that a computer generated voice in a specific frequency range is some sort of political statement?
undoware 8y ago
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.
- undoware 8y ago
  gosh I love the downvotes boys. hypothesis confirmed
diss 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      Seems like it is affected by both, no? Transgender women tend to speak differently after they begin to transition.
      - diss 8y ago
        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.
oldgun 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - wahern 8y ago
    And it's the same wrong idea as violent video games making children more violent. Both (a) fail to appreciate substantive causes and relationships, and (b) discount the nuanced contextual distinctions that people (even children) naturally make. 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.
  - seventhtiger 8y ago
    I mean, to really address this problem, don't we need genderless employees in the workplace?
    - gregknicholson 8y ago
      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.
wyck 8y ago
Is this the state of start-ups again, inventing something no one wants or needs?
nmstoker 8y ago
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
NoblePublius 8y ago
I put my Siri into British. Servants should be British. Is that racist?
gonational 8y ago
If I could bring somebody here from anywhere between 100 to 10,000 years ago, to show them the absolute state of society...
MisterTea 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > … 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.
  - jamesrom 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech Whether you are a fan of those characterizations or not. It's real.
    - purple-dragon 8y ago
      I know what’s real and I know people both gay and not gay (both adult and children) that have to deal with prejudicial treatment simply because of how they “sound”. But please, continue to defend yourself judging people or putting them in a box over something so superficial if you like—just don’t expect anyone to find it endearing.
      - jamesrom 8y ago
googley 8y ago
This is the biggest nothing burger in the entire world. Why is this on hacker news?
blhack 8y ago
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.
- losvedir 8y ago
  So why not just use a male voice then?
- grrowl 8y ago
  And around the other way, the reason people respond better to female assistant voices is because our culture has historically treated women as subservient. This important change (to our old gendered culture, and new nearly universally female automated assistants) is coming, so at least Q is pushing the conversation.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  Trains is hard job
- collarzoon 8y ago
  > 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.
- mrob 8y ago
  There are technical reasons to use a female voice. A female voice better matches the frequency response of the human ear than a male voice, and the frequency response of small loudspeakers like those found in phones. However, a pitched-up male voice could have the same frequency content, and it wouldn't sound any weirder than this "neutral" voice.
- 8y ago
Tade0 8y ago
I can't help to hear it as the voice of the person interviewed in that infamous clip titled "Why are you gay (you are gay)".
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kazinator 8y ago
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.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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?
  - pssdbt 8y ago
    Supporting that for people who want it is one thing, living in a world where we act like there is no gender is another. A lot of us enjoy being and/or identifying as male/female.
  - wahern 8y ago
    It's not something most people support, including most LGBT activists, notwithstanding that they may believe otherwise. 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....
antt 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I didn't quite catch that...
  - ctoth 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      Well either that or Espeak has broken something badly with their rate boost because wow, that's pretty terrible.
      - antt 8y ago
        Standard espeak at 1000 wpm on the setting I put on the other comment. eSpeak NG text-to-speech: 1.49.2
    - gugagore 8y ago
      I thought that the argument being made is: By doing formant synthesis, we can make speech sounds maximally contrastive. Part of what makes natural speech sound as it does is because the physical and linguistic process that generates it causes assimilation. The period of time during which a phoneme sounds also contains information about neighboring sounds. So I was expecting something easy to listen to.
zawerf 8y ago
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-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-...
tmcw 8y ago
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.
- mises 8y ago
  There's a lot of people saying that alexa is a girl because it's perceived as more helpful. But have we thought about the fact that maybe it's perceived as more nice or as less threatening? There's a reason movie villains are stereotypically male voice actors - deeper male voices sound less friendly, forget helpful.
  - tmcw 8y ago
    These gender stereotypes are the reason why this voice exists.
  - bisby 8y ago
    Is that natural instinct or societal training? If we start using non-female voices for voice assistants, maybe we can train people that a voice doesn't have to be female to be helpful. Otherwise if we use female voices because society is just used to it, then we're just reinforcing an unnecessary stereotype for convenience.
    - mises 8y ago
      Forget helpful, maybe it's more kind? I don't know if it's "societal training" or not, but it's not our job, nor is it that of a company, to try to "train people". Deliberately introducing something that makes your customers uncomfortable is not a responsible action for a company to take upon the part of its shareholders.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    i'm pretty sure it's because hollywood has been conditioning us to hear flat affect male robot voices as sinister for 50 years
crazygringo 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    I'd guess you're noticing voices a lot more because of your efforts. I don't really notice at all, possibly because I'm not paying attention. I wonder if I heard the Q voice in normal usage (like on a phone system) I'd notice?
    - exelius 8y ago
      I’d actually be interested to see how it performs under heavy voice compression (such as a phone system).
rocky1138 8y ago
This is neat, but I don't care if my AI's voice is genderless. I'm fine with whatever. I usually pick female.
peterwwillis 8y ago
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.
fenwick67 8y ago
This is awesome. My computer shouldn't need a gender. It's a computer.
- dchest 8y ago
  A computer is a masculine noun in two of the languages that I use.
  - kaybe 8y ago
    I'm sure you can find plenty of synonyms where it's feminine.
    - dchest 8y ago
      Indeed, at least in Russian the original term ("electronic calculating machine"),which was used before "computer" was adopted, was indeed feminine.
bitwize 8y ago
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.
dominotw 8y ago
new career option for elizabeth holmes.
hndamien 8y ago
I would have thought a deep learning approach trying to fool a classifier would have been a more politically neutral approach.
BenMorganIO 8y ago
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.
sabalaba 8y ago
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.
Adamantcheese 8y ago
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.
piyush_soni 8y ago
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.
habosa 8y ago
This actually worked for me. Sounded like the gender could go either way and the voice was pleasant enough. I'd install it.
kkarakk 8y ago
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
zapzupnz 8y ago
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?
dingo_bat 8y ago
I want my virtual assistants more realistic, not less. This sounds nothing like a real person.
chicob 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 !
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    That's a wonderful point; I need to get around to reading Beauvoir.
black-tea 8y ago
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".
j00pY 8y ago
It sounds female to me, but I like it. It sounds like something out of a ships computer in a sci-fi film.
raehik 8y ago
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.
floatboth 8y ago
Sounds awesome. But calling something "Q" is a weird choice, considering a recent conspiracy theory
- mbel 8y ago
  Can you elaborate to which recent conspiracy theory are you referring to?
  - floatboth 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
nonsince 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Or maybe because it kinda does sound like a gay flight attendant. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
  - purple-dragon 8y ago
    It’s disappointing to see you pull out such an easy, cheap, and tired stereotype.
    - thraway-burnout 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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 8y ago
        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.
thraway-burnout 8y ago
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 8y ago
  It's just a voice. You can dislike it without having to get worked up about it.
  - thraway-burnout 8y ago
    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.
tacone 8y ago
Next up: vocal synthesis of males and females replying in chorus.
dsego 8y ago
Sounds like a transgender or queer male person.
sparkling 8y ago
Imagine being triggered by your GPS devices voice Grow up
leifg 8y ago
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"
self_awareness 8y ago
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.
ravenstine 8y ago
It sounds like the creepy female changeling from Deep Space Nine but with a slight British twang.
cfv 8y ago
Nope, sorry. US politics have made me develop a reflex disdain for anything new named like that.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
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.
CryptoPunk 8y ago
This reminds me of Harrison Bergeron, a story about a dystopian future where any inequality is brutally suppressed.
i_am_nomad 8y ago
Sounds more feminine than Elizabeth Holmes, in any case.
KickTheKidS 8y ago
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.
jscholes 8y ago
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.
thisanaccount1 8y ago
How often will you be wrong if you assume someone is gay because they speak in the stereotypical gay manner? Almost never.
mrankin 8y ago
That doesn't sound like John de Lancie at all!
- pndy 8y ago
  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 8y ago
Sounds like a strong, independent lesbian

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 8y ago
I don't know, I thought it was pretty spot on. I thought 140hz sounded consistently male.

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chomp 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

macinjosh 8y ago

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

carimura 8y ago
+1 for whisper.
- jolmg 8y ago
  Yeah. For some reason it reminds me of S.E. Lain.
  - hex12648430 8y ago
    >For some reason That's because it's the voice used to announce the titles of the episodes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KV84lt9Kho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KV84lt9Kho
dbg31415 8y ago
Decepticons, attack! * Soundwave G1 voice compilation part I - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOu3hYXE_tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOu3hYXE_tM
- deleted 8y ago
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PaulHoule 8y ago
I like the voice "Ivy" from Amazon's Polly. 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.
whywhywhywhy 8y ago
Although these are gimmicky the sort of route of approaching the problem from what would a machine or non-human AI voice sound like would actually get you the goal of a Genderless Voice. 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.

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Uhhrrr 8y ago

What problem does this solve?

deleted_account 8y ago
"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."
- maccio92 8y ago
  Ahh, so delusion
- monksy 8y ago
  > stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress 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.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    > What stereotypes would this help to alleviate? Though I don't feel strongly either way, my guess is that, since people usually leave software on defaults and female voices are typically chosen for voice assistants, the stereotype might be of women being servants.
    - diss 8y ago
      That seems to me like a far reaching problem to solve. I don't believe anyone actually thinks like that, I think this hypothetical issue exists in the minds of people trying to solve it.

tokyodude 8y ago

That's not Pat? https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl

dbg31415 8y ago
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

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b_tterc_p 8y ago

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

Yver 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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?
daenz 8y ago
I had the same experience. I hope this isn't going to spin off more academic work about why our brains are hard-wired to be sexist by continually and automatically trying to perceive the gender of speaker based on their speech.
wccrawford 8y ago
I agree. But most of the time it just sounded like the typical deep female computer voice that scifi has used for decades.

Akinato 8y ago

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

i_am_nomad 8y ago
It doesn’t solve a problem, it’s just not “problematic.”

davidhyde 8y ago

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

7e 8y ago

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

feikname 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

caprese 8y ago

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.

phaedryx 8y ago

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

daenz 8y ago
I'm half serious when I say this, but calling it "unnatural" can border on intolerance, for somewhat obvious reasons.
- zamalek 8y ago
  If we could figure out how to make a genderless voice, then it would be intolerant. This is not a gender neutral voice. It sounds like it's cycling between female-type and male-type voices with a very strong bias towards female-type. I applaud the effort, but it falls very short. The voice itself is intolerant because it's almost a parody.
  - phaedryx 8y ago
    Yeah, I think that's it. If it were consistent it would work much better.

cagenut 8y ago

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.

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qmanjamz 8y ago

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.

mises 8y ago

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.

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kazinator 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago

qwerty9876 8y ago

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

egypturnash 8y ago

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

ars 8y ago

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.

undoware 8y ago

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

kkarakk 8y ago
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 8y ago
  you're literally telling me what I sound like. that's one hell of a splain
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    splains is hard job
    - undoware 8y ago
      anything with the statistical frequency of splaining is unlikely to be terribly difficult work

sdinsn 8y ago

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

undoware 8y ago

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.

undoware 8y ago
gosh I love the downvotes boys. hypothesis confirmed

diss 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Seems like it is affected by both, no? Transgender women tend to speak differently after they begin to transition.
    - diss 8y ago
      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.

oldgun 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- wahern 8y ago
  And it's the same wrong idea as violent video games making children more violent. Both (a) fail to appreciate substantive causes and relationships, and (b) discount the nuanced contextual distinctions that people (even children) naturally make. 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.
- seventhtiger 8y ago
  I mean, to really address this problem, don't we need genderless employees in the workplace?
  - gregknicholson 8y ago
    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.

wyck 8y ago

Is this the state of start-ups again, inventing something no one wants or needs?

nmstoker 8y ago

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

NoblePublius 8y ago

I put my Siri into British. Servants should be British. Is that racist?

gonational 8y ago

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

MisterTea 8y ago

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 8y ago
> … 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.
- jamesrom 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech Whether you are a fan of those characterizations or not. It's real.
  - purple-dragon 8y ago
    I know what’s real and I know people both gay and not gay (both adult and children) that have to deal with prejudicial treatment simply because of how they “sound”. But please, continue to defend yourself judging people or putting them in a box over something so superficial if you like—just don’t expect anyone to find it endearing.
    - jamesrom 8y ago

googley 8y ago

This is the biggest nothing burger in the entire world. Why is this on hacker news?

blhack 8y ago

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.

losvedir 8y ago
So why not just use a male voice then?
grrowl 8y ago
And around the other way, the reason people respond better to female assistant voices is because our culture has historically treated women as subservient. This important change (to our old gendered culture, and new nearly universally female automated assistants) is coming, so at least Q is pushing the conversation.
kkarakk 8y ago
Trains is hard job
collarzoon 8y ago
> 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.
mrob 8y ago
There are technical reasons to use a female voice. A female voice better matches the frequency response of the human ear than a male voice, and the frequency response of small loudspeakers like those found in phones. However, a pitched-up male voice could have the same frequency content, and it wouldn't sound any weirder than this "neutral" voice.
8y ago

Tade0 8y ago

I can't help to hear it as the voice of the person interviewed in that infamous clip titled "Why are you gay (you are gay)".

deleted 8y ago

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kazinator 8y ago

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.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

> 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 8y ago
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?
- pssdbt 8y ago
  Supporting that for people who want it is one thing, living in a world where we act like there is no gender is another. A lot of us enjoy being and/or identifying as male/female.
- wahern 8y ago
  It's not something most people support, including most LGBT activists, notwithstanding that they may believe otherwise. 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....

antt 8y ago

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 8y ago
I didn't quite catch that...
- ctoth 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Well either that or Espeak has broken something badly with their rate boost because wow, that's pretty terrible.
    - antt 8y ago
      Standard espeak at 1000 wpm on the setting I put on the other comment. eSpeak NG text-to-speech: 1.49.2
  - gugagore 8y ago
    I thought that the argument being made is: By doing formant synthesis, we can make speech sounds maximally contrastive. Part of what makes natural speech sound as it does is because the physical and linguistic process that generates it causes assimilation. The period of time during which a phoneme sounds also contains information about neighboring sounds. So I was expecting something easy to listen to.

zawerf 8y ago

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-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-...

tmcw 8y ago

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.

mises 8y ago
There's a lot of people saying that alexa is a girl because it's perceived as more helpful. But have we thought about the fact that maybe it's perceived as more nice or as less threatening? There's a reason movie villains are stereotypically male voice actors - deeper male voices sound less friendly, forget helpful.
- tmcw 8y ago
  These gender stereotypes are the reason why this voice exists.
- bisby 8y ago
  Is that natural instinct or societal training? If we start using non-female voices for voice assistants, maybe we can train people that a voice doesn't have to be female to be helpful. Otherwise if we use female voices because society is just used to it, then we're just reinforcing an unnecessary stereotype for convenience.
  - mises 8y ago
    Forget helpful, maybe it's more kind? I don't know if it's "societal training" or not, but it's not our job, nor is it that of a company, to try to "train people". Deliberately introducing something that makes your customers uncomfortable is not a responsible action for a company to take upon the part of its shareholders.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  i'm pretty sure it's because hollywood has been conditioning us to hear flat affect male robot voices as sinister for 50 years

crazygringo 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I'd guess you're noticing voices a lot more because of your efforts. I don't really notice at all, possibly because I'm not paying attention. I wonder if I heard the Q voice in normal usage (like on a phone system) I'd notice?
  - exelius 8y ago
    I’d actually be interested to see how it performs under heavy voice compression (such as a phone system).

rocky1138 8y ago

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

peterwwillis 8y ago

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.

fenwick67 8y ago

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

dchest 8y ago
A computer is a masculine noun in two of the languages that I use.
- kaybe 8y ago
  I'm sure you can find plenty of synonyms where it's feminine.
  - dchest 8y ago
    Indeed, at least in Russian the original term ("electronic calculating machine"),which was used before "computer" was adopted, was indeed feminine.

bitwize 8y ago

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.

dominotw 8y ago

new career option for elizabeth holmes.

hndamien 8y ago

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

BenMorganIO 8y ago

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.

sabalaba 8y ago

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.

Adamantcheese 8y ago

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.

piyush_soni 8y ago

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.

habosa 8y ago

This actually worked for me. Sounded like the gender could go either way and the voice was pleasant enough. I'd install it.

kkarakk 8y ago

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

zapzupnz 8y ago

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?

dingo_bat 8y ago

I want my virtual assistants more realistic, not less. This sounds nothing like a real person.

chicob 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 !
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  That's a wonderful point; I need to get around to reading Beauvoir.

black-tea 8y ago

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".

j00pY 8y ago

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

raehik 8y ago

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.

floatboth 8y ago

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

mbel 8y ago
Can you elaborate to which recent conspiracy theory are you referring to?
- floatboth 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

nonsince 8y ago

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 8y ago
Or maybe because it kinda does sound like a gay flight attendant. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
- purple-dragon 8y ago
  It’s disappointing to see you pull out such an easy, cheap, and tired stereotype.
  - thraway-burnout 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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.

thraway-burnout 8y ago

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 8y ago
It's just a voice. You can dislike it without having to get worked up about it.
- thraway-burnout 8y ago
  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.

tacone 8y ago

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

dsego 8y ago

Sounds like a transgender or queer male person.

sparkling 8y ago

Imagine being triggered by your GPS devices voice Grow up

leifg 8y ago

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"

self_awareness 8y ago

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.

ravenstine 8y ago

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

cfv 8y ago

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

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

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.

CryptoPunk 8y ago

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

i_am_nomad 8y ago

Sounds more feminine than Elizabeth Holmes, in any case.

KickTheKidS 8y ago

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.

jscholes 8y ago

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.

thisanaccount1 8y ago

How often will you be wrong if you assume someone is gay because they speak in the stereotypical gay manner? Almost never.

mrankin 8y ago

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

pndy 8y ago
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 8y ago

Sounds like a strong, independent lesbian