The creative team behind Vice has launched what they’re calling a “genderless” artifcial intelligence voice in order, they say, to combat the gender bias that pervades modern technology.
Ad Week reports that Vice’s creative team unveiled “Q,” the “genderless AI,” at the South by Southwest Interactive festival this week in Austin, Texas. The voice itself, which they hope will take the place of female-identified smart assistances like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortina, “is a composite of dozens of voices of people who identify as non-binary.”
The team behind the voice recorded around two dozen people, developed four separate voices, and then tested them on 4,500 Europeans to determine which voice was the most “neutral.”
The result is a voice that can’t readily be identified as fully male or female, that sits between the two accepted ranges of “gendered” voices, and eliminates speech quirks typically associated with either “male” or “female” voices. – READ MORE