Genderless Voice

Q - a gender-neutral voice assistant

I saw this article a while ago and forgot about it/to read it but knew I wanted to share it with the blog. I think it's super cool and interesting because I have rarely thought about the voice assistants and the way their pitch/tones imply gender or affect the way people take in information. Before I had read this article I assumed that voice assistants are usually female-sounding because of motherly, comforting, and familiar feeling women are associate with. In the article, they discuss that female-sounding voices can be preferred in assistive settings while male-sounding voices can be used as an authority source. Similarly, I watched a John Mulaney bit where he said he heard that people take information from a female's voice but take a warning from a male's voice. Now I don't know how accurate his sources are but it seems to match what was implied in the article. Overall, I found this a really cool way in facilitating discussion and conversation about gender through a different lens and medium, voice assistants/AI, that is just going to get more prevalent with the growing technology.