Why computer voices are mostly female

o most owners of the new iPhone, the voice-activated feature called Siri is more than a virtual "assistant" who can help schedule appointments, find a good nearby pizza or tell you if it's going to rain.

She's also a she.

Siri answers questions in a part-human, part-robot voice that's deep, briskly efficient and distinctly female. (At least in the U.S. and four other countries. In France and the UK, Siri is male.)

People describe the app using female pronouns. Her gender has even prompted some users to flood blogs and online forums with sexually suggestive questions for Siri such as "What are you wearing?" (Siri's baffled response: "Why do people keep asking me this?")

The fuss over Siri's sex also raises a larger question: From voice-mail systems to GPS devices to Siri and beyond, why are so many computerized voices female?

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."
HAL, the homicidal artificial intelligence in \
HAL, the homicidal artificial intelligence in "2001: A space Odyssey," may have scared manufacturers away from male automated voices.

Research suggests this preference starts as early as the womb, Nass said. He cites a study in which fetuses were found to react to the sound of their mother's voice but not to other female voices. The fetuses showed no distinct reaction to their father's voice, however.

Another answer lies in history. According to some sources, the use of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women's voices were employed in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots. And telephone operators have traditionally been female, making people accustomed to getting assistance from a disembodied woman's voice.

When automakers were first installing automated voice prompts in cars ("your door is ajar") decades ago, their consumer research found that people overwhelmingly preferred female voices to male ones, said Tim Bajarin, a Silicon Valley analyst and president of Creative Strategies Inc.

This may explain why in almost all GPS navigation systems on the market, the default voice is female. 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.

"Cultural stereotypes run deep," said Nass, who details the BMW episode in his book.

Voice casting

Most companies that produce automated voices hold auditions for voice actors and collect recordings of them speaking. Then they invite focus groups to listen to the recordings and rate the voices on how well they convey certain attributes: warmth, friendliness, competence and so on.

"It's casting," Nass said. "It's something Hollywood has known for a long, long time."

Look no further than examples of automated or artificial-intelligence voices in sci-fi movies and TV shows. Voices of authority or menace tend to be male: the homicidal HAL 9000 computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the computer program in "WarGames," or Auto, the spaceship's autopilot function in "Wall-E." More subservient talking machines, such as the onboard computer from the "Star Trek" TV series, skew female.

Bajarin, the Silicon Valley analyst, believes that more computerized voices would be masculine if not for the associations with HAL, whose malicious intent in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film was made even creepier by his soothing tone.

"A lot of tech companies stayed away from the male voice because of HAL," he said. "I've heard that theory tossed around multiple times." (One prominent exception: The chipper "You've got mail!" voice from AOL's dial-up days.)
What Apple did is absolutely brilliant. They took Siri and gave it more of a personality.
Norman Winarsky

When it comes to consumer applications of computerized voices, the sex of the voice is usually determined by what service or product is employing it. For example, transit systems such as the San Francisco Area's BART often use higher-pitched voices because they are easier to hear over the clatter of the train cars.

Nuance, a Massachusetts-based company that develops speech technologies for Ford vehicles' SYNC system, Amazon e-readers and other clients, creates both male and female voices. It's then up to the client to choose which voice, and gender, best fits their product, said chief creative officer Gary Clayton.

"As these products become part of our everyday lives, there's a huge opportunity for personalization," added Brant Ward, the company's director of advanced speech design. "I could have an approximation of my wife's voice read me a text message in my car."

Siri: Brilliant or sexist?

Siri, the iPhone 4S's voice, grew from a five-year research project that was funded by military agency DARPA and led by SRI International, a Bay Area research institute. The project spawned a company, also called Siri, that launched an iPhone app in February 2010 and was acquired by Apple two months later.

That original Siri voice-to-text app -- powered in part by Nuance's technology -- also worked by people speaking commands into their phones, although it didn't talk back. And it had no gender. In fact, the app was originally conceived to speak in a gender-neutral voice, said Norman Winarsky, vice president of SRI and a co-founder of Siri.

"What Apple did is absolutely brilliant," said Winarsky, who calls speech "the most natural of all human interfaces."

"They took Siri and gave it more of a personality," he said. "It's the first real artificial intelligence working in millions of people's hands."

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. "Eww!! Hope UK gets female voice soon," wrote one commenter. "I don't think anyone in the US cares about male voice option."

Many GPS devices and computer text-to-speech programs now offer multiple voice options. And someday soon, voice-technology experts say, Siri will probably speak in a variety of voices, too.

Until then, some bloggers have wondered: Are computerized female "assistants" sexist?

Not necessarily, said Rebecca Zorach, director of the Social Media Project at the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

"I think they have to be understood in a broader context in which they're one small piece," she wrote in an e-mail to CNN. "Voices intended to convey authority (such as voice-over narration in films) tend to be male. So yes, probably these compliant female robot voices reinforce gender stereotypes, not just because they serve the user but because the technology itself is about communication and relationships (areas that women are presumed to be good at).

"I wouldn't automatically claim any sexism in individual companies' choices, though. Most such decisions are probably the result of market research, so they may be reflecting gender stereotypes that already exist in the general public."

Zorach listened to some sound clips of Siri online, then e-mailed back again.

"What's interesting to me is how they seem to intentionally make her speech sound artificial -- they could choose to make her speech more seamless and human-like, but they choose instead to highlight the technology," she said. "That makes you aware of how high-tech your gadget is."

Google Mulls Buying Yahoo

Google is mulling purchasing Yahoo and has contacted at least two venture capital firms to help buy the company’s core business, according to a report.

Google and prospective partners have held discussions, but haven’t put forth a formal proposal to buy the search giant, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited “a person familiar with the matter.”

As the story notes, any such deal is likely to raise red flags among antitrust regulators. Google’s not the only one rumored to be interested in buying the troubled Yahoo. Microsoft, which has a 10-year search deal with Yahoo, is also said to be interested.

Twitter study reveals people’s mood swings

 Researchers at Cornell University have looked at more than half a billion tweets across 84 countries to find out how people's moods change through the day.

A study that analysed millions of tweets over a period of two years has revealed that people are most cheerful soon after waking up. Their mood then worsens as the day continues, before lifting again last thing at night.
Sure, most of us probably could’ve guessed this would be the case, but here’s a study that appears to confirm it.
Researchers at Cornell University in New York state looked at more than half a billion tweets by 2.54 million individuals in 84 countries and discovered that people generally wake up in a good mood (well, after that initial bleary-eyed phase passes) but as the day goes on their mood gradually worsens.
The results of the study, which was carried out by Cornell graduate student Scott Golder, were published in the journal Science on Thursday.
Together with another graduate student, Golder came up with a computer program that pulled information from all Twitter accounts which were set up between February 2008 and April 2009. Four hundred messages were analysed from each of these accounts.
They then used a text analysis program to look at the type of language used and the time of day that the tweets were written and posted.
Out of the all the data they collected, the researchers concluded that people the world over were in the best mood early in the morning and again close to midnight. On the weekend, the good-mood peak was a little later in the morning, presumably because people were sleeping late.
The authors noted that the mood cycle on weekdays (when most people are working or studying) was very similar to that of weekends (when most people are relaxing), indicating that sleep patterns and circadian rhythms had a big influence on mood regardless of the stresses of the day.
From behavior-oriented words in the tweets, they also discovered that bacon is more popular than sausage and that it takes an average of seven hours to become drunk (that seems rather long, doesn’t it?). This finding was based on the time between tweets about “beer” and later tweets about being “drunk.”
A medical sociologist at Harvard University, Dr. Nicholas Christakis, said that while the results of the study may not seem so astonishing, what it does show is how web users’ “little digital breadcrumbs” can be used for research.
But as psychologist Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania pointed out, using social media for research also throws up the problem of ensuring you have a representative sample. “Young, educated, rich people use social media. Rural Indian farmers do not,” he said.

Gamers help discover two new planets

Using the game Planet Hunters, gamers have discovered two new planets in the Cygnus constellation.

In what is starting to look like the beginnings of a trend, casual gamers have helped scientists make significant discoveries through a specially designed game for the second time this month. Using a small portion of the massive amounts of data collected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, people playing the browser-based game Planet Hunters have helped to identify two new planets in the Cygnus Constellation.

Earlier this months a different type of game called FoldIt helped researchers solve a decade old chemical structure puzzle, thanks to the efforts of thousands of gamers around the world that were presented with an enzyme as part of a puzzle game. Within ten days the combined efforts of the gamers resulted in deciphering the enzyme which could help AIDS researchers find a cure.

While perhaps not quite as groundbreaking, the recently released report for Planet Hunters shows that using average citizens to help with complex tasks—when presented in an entertaining fashion—can lead to some incredible results.

“Planet Hunters is a new citizen science project, designed to engage the public in an exoplanet search using NASA Kepler public release data. In the first month after launch, users identified two new planet candidates which survived our checks for false-positives,” the report said.

Where FoldIt was essentially a puzzle game that gave scores and even had leaderboards for properly aligning enzymes in their most energy efficient manner, Planet Hunters is a bit more observational in nature. The game takes sections of data from NASA’s Kepler telescope, then asks users to look for light anomalies, which could lead to the discovery of a planet.

The Kepler telescope has currently collected light emission data on over 150,000 stars. The telescope measures the light output of these stars every 30 seconds in the hopes that it will see a slight dimming, which could denote that a planet is crossing the sun’s surface and blocking a small portion of the light output. The bigger the planet, the bigger the dimming effect. Computers can help compile the data, but are not able to differentiate the transit events anymore than a computer could identify a particular face from a picture of crowded football stadium. It is meticulous work that needs to be done by a person.

The sheer amount of data researchers have to go through is overwhelming, and that’s where Planet Hunters comes in. People are asked to sift through fields of stars that have been tracked for a 30+ day period. Players then look for “transit events,” which is the brief dimming in the star that happens when a planet passes in front of it. The further a planet is from the star, the longer it will be before it crosses and therefore becomes more difficult to find, while the planets closet to their stars are relatively easier to detect. Players are tasked with identifying these light dips.

While not quite as enthralling as FoldIt’s puzzle format, Planet Hunter has registered over 40,000 members since it went live in 2009. In 4 million games the players have discovered 69 possible planets, the first two of which have just passed NASA’s scrutiny. NASA researchers will continue to sift through the data submitted and announce any more results. As for the people that discovered the two planets, I09 reports that they will officially acknowledged by the Royal Astronomical Society.

The game is funded by the zooniverse.org, a scientific community website that presents projects like Planet Hunters in order to help professionals sort through data in fun ways.

“The involvement of citizen scientists as part of Planet Hunters is therefore shown to be a valuable and reliable tool in exoplanet detection,” the report confirmed.

20 percent of women would give up sex for Facebook

With the addictive nature of Facebook growing with more personal information being shared on the social network, some women would ditch their partners to peruse the latest batch of status updates rather than spend time in the bedroom.

In a survey of over 2,000 women conducted by Cosmopolitan magazine, one in five women would rather give up sex for a week than giving up all the time spent on Facebook checking up on the lives of friends. Adding to that figure, about 57 percent of the female respondents would rather hang onto their computer than give it up for a week just to have sex and 50 percent would do the same with their mobile smartphone. However, 80 percent of the group would easily give up their favorite television shows for a week and 70 percent would stop texting over a mobile phone for a week to continue having sex.

A recent Telenav study in August 2011 found that one-third of Americans wouldn’t give up their smartphones for a week to continue having sex. Combine that with the Cosmopolitan survey and that percentage is likely skewed upwards due to more females over men ditching sex to hang onto their smartphone. Over vices and activities that ranked over 50 percent in that Telenav study included exercise, caffeine, chocolate and alcohol; all of which would easily be halted for a week to continue using a mobile phone. Another study from the presentation creating SlideRocket found that nearly one out of four people would give up sexual relations if that meant being able to avoid another boring PowerPoint presentation while in an office meeting.

Even more extreme, a Kelton Research study conducted during June 2011 found that 25 percent of college students would give up dating and sex for an entire year if they could ditch purchasing and lugging around heavy textbooks. The alternative would be in the form of digital textbooks through devices like the Kindle. Seventy percent of the group preferred the idea of digital textbooks over the paper alternative and over half of the group claimed that it would make studying more efficient.

Japanese toilet maker Toto unveils motorcycle powered by poop

To highlight a green initiative being undertaken by Japanese toilet maker Toto, the company has unveiled a motorcycle powered by human waste. Could this be a vision of the future? No, probably not.

Now that the dust is beginning to settle following the hype surrounding the launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S, it’s time to get back to the serious stuff: Japanese toilet maker Toto has just unveiled a poo-powered motorcycle.

The ingenious design runs on human waste, but what makes it really special is that you can fill it up while you’re moving along – that’s right, the toilet is fitted directly onto the vehicle.

OK, before you start asking, “Where can I get myself one of these?”.…(hang on, you weren’t really going to ask that, were you?), we’d better make it clear that there are currently no plans for a commercial release of Toilet Bike Neo. Indeed, the only release taking place will be by the person riding the vehicle.

The bike, complete with large toilet roll on the back, has been created to draw attention to the Toto Green Challenge (pdf) campaign, where the company has set itself a number of targets to reduce CO2 emissions across all areas of its business by 2017.

Apparently the motorcycle’s toilet also plays music, and even talks. You can see a video (in Japanese) of one of Toto’s talking toilets here.

On Thursday the unique motorcycle will begin a month-long poo-fueled journey across Japan from Toto’s base in the west of the country all the way to Tokyo, publicizing its Green Challenge initiative as it goes, and educating people about how they can cut down on their emissions, so to speak. The Toto blog will be documenting Toilet Bike Neo’s journey to the Japanese capital.

We assume the rider of the poo-powered motorcycle won’t have to waste time making a bathroom stop, though it’s possible they could still end up stranded by the roadside if they run out of gas.