Why Computer Voices Are Mostly Female 276
PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article exploring the question posed in the headline, which says that "One answer may lie in biology. Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women's voices more pleasing than men's. 'It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,' said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of 'The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships. 'It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.' One notable exception has been Germany, where BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on its 5 Series cars in the late 1990s after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on why the company gave Siri a female voice in the U.S. Nor would she say why Siri speaks like a man in the UK, where iPhone 4S owners have swarmed online forums to request a female voice instead."
NYC Subway (Score:5, Interesting)
One day I had the interesting observation on the New York Subway that the recorded voices with informational statements were female, and the statements asking the passenger to do something ("Please stand clear of the door") were all male.
Siri (Score:5, Interesting)
So US Siri is a secretary and UK Siri is a gentleman's gentleman ?
Female voices are easier to understand (?) (Score:3, Interesting)
In the army there is a known fact/myth that female voices are easier to understand on noisy radio links.
Something to do white the a different/better frequency spread than a male voice.
In my not very scientific experience, it seems to be true.
Re:Opposite Sex (Score:5, Interesting)
Surely most people prefer to listen to the opposite sex, provided they do not suffer from sexual identity disorder or a similar crippling condition ...
I'm guessing it's the same phenomenon as with magazines. The manly magazines are full of highly attractive women. The womanly magazines are also full of highly attractive women. Men like talking to a woman. Women like talking to another woman. It probably goes all the way back to our cavemen days where women were chatting at camp or out gathering, while the men were more rivals and out hunting pray, which obviously leads to less talking. So most everyone feels better talking to a woman, except when taking directions on where to drive. Which some say can also be traced back to our cavemen days...
I always thought the reasons were technical (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NYC Subway (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NYC Subway (Score:4, Interesting)
Listen to the republican debate (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoever wrote this story hasn't been listening to the republican debate. I want to poke out my eardrums whenever michelle bachman speaks, sorry, screams.
Re:Not a myth (Score:3, Interesting)
You're doing it wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't mean 'only hang out with dudes', it means 'don't screw over your friends to get laid'.
Re:Read better (Score:5, Interesting)
Academic studies always show that we prefer female voices, but in reality, those who count on computer generated voices all day prefer male voices. Note all the readers mentioning James Earl Jones. The reason studies like this get it wrong is simple. They get random groups of people who never use computer voices to take part in their experiments, and such people initially prefer female voices. If the experiments were to run long enough for participants to become expert listeners, they would find they trend towards male voices. I do a lot of looking at speech signals, and my unsupported theory as to why we switch to male voices is that male voices cover a broader portion of the sweet spot in our hearing, where we perceive sound most sensitively. This makes male voices easier to listen to if you have to listen for long periods of time. They are also easier to understand in noisy environments, thus thus the classic low male ham radio voice.
To understand what people like when they have to listen a lot to computer generated voices, just ask the blind. I was the tech lead for Vinux 3.0, which is Linux for the Vision Impaired. That doesn't make me an expert, but here are my observations. The most popular voices for blind programmers are male, probably eloquence first (it can play very fast), followed by espeak (because it's free and everywhere), followed by various low-speed commercial male voices. The most popular Mac voice for the blind is Adam, a mechanical guy with a decent voice that can play at decent speed. The female voices are often discussed, usually with adjectives like sexy, emotional, sultry, and so on, but in the end the blind go back to their male TTS engines to get work done.
I did a lot of testing to try and speed up voices to the speeds the blind like to listen. The result is the sonic library, which powers speech speed-up in various programs like the Astro Nova player at up to 6X playback speed. At least one blind lister can listen with high comprehension to a male voice (eloquence) at about 1,500 words per minute, or 7X the default speed of this high speed voice. At this speed, the original vowels are typically compressed to one or two pitch periods. It's incredible that a blind listener can still perceive these as whole phonemes. To achieve higher speed, I've told him he needs to consider listening to a female voice, where I could get perhaps twice as many pitch periods into the same 10-ish milliseconds where he currently perceives one phoneme. The problem is that at higher fundamental pitch, this voice will register on a smaller portion of his hearing bandwidth, making it harder to get as much information out of it high speed. We've not yet had any luck with high speed female voices.
As a person losing central vision, I experienced all this myself. When I first started using computer generated voices, I tried to find a female voice I could live with. I tried a couple of smooth female Cepstral voices, but before long they sounded grating and frustratingly slow. My blind friend told me to avoid the "natural" voices and go with something that I could listen to at high speed, but I just couldn't stand the mechanical voice he was pushing - eloquence. Well, he was right. I eventually migrated to eloquence just like him and many blind people. James Earl Jones has the perfect voice for computers. It's low enough to take advantage of every bit of bandwidth we easily perceive. It's broad spectrum, taking advantage of the high frequencies as well, and very consistent, making his voice addictive. Your ear likes consistency.