She & Him →
Peter Kafka’s “Occam’s Razor” thought as to why the Siri voice is female and not male: because it would remind people too much of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Cute. But wrong.
Actually, the voice varies from country to country. The UK version, for example, uses a man’s voice. I know this because I’m in England and got a demo of the feature here.
Also awesome: Siri didn’t work for me when UK English was turned on. When I switched to US English, it worked perfectly. It understands accents.
Varying the voice by country is very smart. BMW’s German customers demanded a product recall when they debuted GPS navigation directions spoken in a synthetic female voice. Presumably, Male Germans couldn’t tolerate being told what to do by a woman. This was studied in depth by a UX Design professor at Stanford, Cliff Nass.
Reminds me of one of Google’s now-explicit rationales for GOOG-411. From this new article:
What was [Google] getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection.
