5 ms·

Why do virtual assistants seem to always have female names?

by rimeice 4y ago

manfre 4y ago
For this project, the readme has a section about the name. tl;dr it's name is from resident evil.
- glowingly 4y ago
  In that game/movie world, it is the name of an AI. Maybe some passdown influence from Star Trek's ship computer, which had a female voice?
  - chmod775 4y ago
    > In that game/movie world, it is the name of an AI. Alice is the name of the main character. The supercomputer/AI was called Red Queen. Though it gets a bit muddled, not least because the Red Queen was created using the template of one Alicia Marcus, of whom Alice herself is a clone.
    - Psychokiller 4y ago
      Thank you for the correct analysis of my thoughts at the moment I started Project Alice :-) Often people will think that Alice and the Red Queen is an easy mix and a wrong shortcut to Resident Evil. But indeed, the Red Queen, in the MOVIES, is at the image of Alicia. When RE last part came out, I wanted to include the white queen in Project Alice' mood, but that's not done yet
astrange 4y ago
In the 90s they had male(?) names like Clippy, Bonzi Buddy and Microsoft Bob. Now we still have Bixby, which sort-of sounds like an English butler.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Not exactly the same thing, but we had Jeeves also
philipp2310 4y ago
dev here (quite overwhelmed by all the new visitors coming from here, thank you all!): My wife doesn't like female assistants either, for us Alice got a male voice and we just pretend it is Alice Cooper ;)
- dadver 4y ago
  Hijacking since you're dev for a straight answer. There's mentions of multiple voice choices. Is one of them a sampling of the red queen in RE movies? I loved her dialect/voice.
  - chmod775 4y ago
    > I loved her dialect/voice. Ah yes. If ever I want an AI assistant to inform me of my imminent death, I want it to be using that voice. "Hey Alice, call an ambulance." "You are going to die." "Thanks Alice." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSmYSZGMZj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSmYSZGMZj0
  - philipp2310 4y ago
    sadly no. CoquiTTS integration was in the making, where you have some voice cloning features, but I had to delay it, as it required some newer versions(python 3.9) and I think it was 64bit only. Currently you got the following choice: Pico, Mycroft, Google Standard/Wavenet, Amazon, IBM Watson And while using one of the cloud variants might cause security concerns, keep in mind, they will only know what to speak, not why (e.g. what your input/request was)
  - Psychokiller 4y ago
    I tried, long ago, using ssml to mod google wavenet, but got nothing concluant
- saghm 4y ago
  The local classic rock radio station in Boston used to have Alice Cooper hosting a certain night each week (I think Friday or Saturday, and presumably pre-recorded and remotely. Maybe he still does it? I haven't lived there for a while now). He was pretty funny! I'd honestly love to have a voice assistant that sounds like him; maybe the way to deal with both the question about what gender the assistant's voice should be and not having to worry about having generated pronunciations sound natural is just to pay some celebrity a bunch of money (and/or some royalties for the assistant) to spend a month in a studio recording a huge amount of stuff with varied pitch and tone and vocabulary and then that to splice together the assistant's responses. Bonus is bringing them back after a year or so to record more stuff to smooth over any rough edges that are found!
makeitdouble 4y ago
To note, names tend to follow the male/unisex -> female shift pattern, so any name chosen now can still end up sounding “female” at any point in time. Except if it’s a name with existing genres variation (like Mario/Maria or Jean/Jeanne) I feel it’s a lost proposition to put too much imaginary in a given name.
banana_giraffe 4y ago
I always assumed it stemmed from the telephone operators being primarily female, which lead to a large corpus of audio recordings, which lead to the training data for the first decent text-to-speech models being mostly women voices.
- ars 4y ago
  It's also because the higher pitched voices are easier to understand when there is noise. I believe the military did some research on this.
  - sliken 4y ago
    I did read about some military research along these lines. I don't recall noise resistance being mentioned, but that the young male air force pilots responded more quickly and accurately to female voices.

Why do virtual assistants seem to always have female names?

manfre 4y ago

For this project, the readme has a section about the name. tl;dr it's name is from resident evil.

glowingly 4y ago
In that game/movie world, it is the name of an AI. Maybe some passdown influence from Star Trek's ship computer, which had a female voice?
- chmod775 4y ago
  > In that game/movie world, it is the name of an AI. Alice is the name of the main character. The supercomputer/AI was called Red Queen. Though it gets a bit muddled, not least because the Red Queen was created using the template of one Alicia Marcus, of whom Alice herself is a clone.
  - Psychokiller 4y ago
    Thank you for the correct analysis of my thoughts at the moment I started Project Alice :-) Often people will think that Alice and the Red Queen is an easy mix and a wrong shortcut to Resident Evil. But indeed, the Red Queen, in the MOVIES, is at the image of Alicia. When RE last part came out, I wanted to include the white queen in Project Alice' mood, but that's not done yet

astrange 4y ago

In the 90s they had male(?) names like Clippy, Bonzi Buddy and Microsoft Bob. Now we still have Bixby, which sort-of sounds like an English butler.

pcthrowaway 4y ago
Not exactly the same thing, but we had Jeeves also

philipp2310 4y ago

dev here (quite overwhelmed by all the new visitors coming from here, thank you all!): My wife doesn't like female assistants either, for us Alice got a male voice and we just pretend it is Alice Cooper ;)

dadver 4y ago
Hijacking since you're dev for a straight answer. There's mentions of multiple voice choices. Is one of them a sampling of the red queen in RE movies? I loved her dialect/voice.
- chmod775 4y ago
  > I loved her dialect/voice. Ah yes. If ever I want an AI assistant to inform me of my imminent death, I want it to be using that voice. "Hey Alice, call an ambulance." "You are going to die." "Thanks Alice." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSmYSZGMZj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSmYSZGMZj0
- philipp2310 4y ago
  sadly no. CoquiTTS integration was in the making, where you have some voice cloning features, but I had to delay it, as it required some newer versions(python 3.9) and I think it was 64bit only. Currently you got the following choice: Pico, Mycroft, Google Standard/Wavenet, Amazon, IBM Watson And while using one of the cloud variants might cause security concerns, keep in mind, they will only know what to speak, not why (e.g. what your input/request was)
- Psychokiller 4y ago
  I tried, long ago, using ssml to mod google wavenet, but got nothing concluant
saghm 4y ago
The local classic rock radio station in Boston used to have Alice Cooper hosting a certain night each week (I think Friday or Saturday, and presumably pre-recorded and remotely. Maybe he still does it? I haven't lived there for a while now). He was pretty funny! I'd honestly love to have a voice assistant that sounds like him; maybe the way to deal with both the question about what gender the assistant's voice should be and not having to worry about having generated pronunciations sound natural is just to pay some celebrity a bunch of money (and/or some royalties for the assistant) to spend a month in a studio recording a huge amount of stuff with varied pitch and tone and vocabulary and then that to splice together the assistant's responses. Bonus is bringing them back after a year or so to record more stuff to smooth over any rough edges that are found!

makeitdouble 4y ago

To note, names tend to follow the male/unisex -> female shift pattern, so any name chosen now can still end up sounding “female” at any point in time. Except if it’s a name with existing genres variation (like Mario/Maria or Jean/Jeanne) I feel it’s a lost proposition to put too much imaginary in a given name.

banana_giraffe 4y ago

I always assumed it stemmed from the telephone operators being primarily female, which lead to a large corpus of audio recordings, which lead to the training data for the first decent text-to-speech models being mostly women voices.

ars 4y ago
It's also because the higher pitched voices are easier to understand when there is noise. I believe the military did some research on this.
- sliken 4y ago
  I did read about some military research along these lines. I don't recall noise resistance being mentioned, but that the young male air force pilots responded more quickly and accurately to female voices.