I suspect it's a cultural thing as well, as a given nation may feel that a male voice is more of an authority, while another may believe that a female voice is more comforting to listen to. It probably goes into gender and power dynamics, but what keeps coming to mind is Q's line from Tomorrow Never Dies: "Thought you'd pay more attention to a female voice."RiboNucleic Asshat wrote:I think some assistants are actually male only in specific languages, which is... a bit baffling. I'm uncertain who makes that decision or why, but it feels rather arbitrary to me.
I know that Google translate's TTS has some languages with a female voice and others with a male voice. I wonder if there's some sort of underlying association between language and perceived gender?
I think it's because of gender of person who's voice was used to train a neural network.RiboNucleic Asshat wrote:I think some assistants are actually male only in specific languages, which is... a bit baffling. I'm uncertain who makes that decision or why, but it feels rather arbitrary to me.
I know that Google translate's TTS has some languages with a female voice and others with a male voice. I wonder if there's some sort of underlying association between language and perceived gender?
At airports and train stations, it's usually a female voice (generally synthesized rather than an actual person speaking) who announces stuff. I was once told this was partly motivated by acoustics -- the more acute timbre of a female voice being easier to understand for a larger part of the population than the graver tone of a male voice. I don't know if this was also what motivated the choice of voice for these assistants, or whether it wasn't simply an (unconscious or not) association of secretarial/assistant work with women, since it is a pink-collar profession.Rachael wrote:Though, I will admit - I find it a bit curious that all 4 of those turned out to be female.
I think it has the same effect as colour-coding. A voice's timbre is very easy to imagine as a colour, and if you have two different colours for each direction then it makes it easier to tell them apart and know what to listen for.Viscra Maelstrom wrote:i'm curious as to why it isn't uniform, since the voice inside trains and buses are female.
Here in Oregon, the MAX light-rail line has a female voice that announces stops in English, and a male voice that announces them in Spanish.Rachael wrote:I think it has the same effect as colour-coding. A voice's timbre is very easy to imagine as a colour, and if you have two different colours for each direction then it makes it easier to tell them apart and know what to listen for.Viscra Maelstrom wrote:i'm curious as to why it isn't uniform, since the voice inside trains and buses are female.
Similarly, in the US, while we do not have synthetic announcers (the operators use the PA system, at least where I live), we have colour coded our lines and routes. So if you want a train that goes on the red route, you have to wait for the blue train to pass first, or you can take the red train if you're really impatient but then you have to get off at the fork.
I see we have the same opinion about these things. I spend enough time with computers already, so my private life is deliberately entirely free of them, I rarely carry a smartphone with me, and the one I use doesn't even have a permanent internet connection, I use a cheap prepaid contract where I only pay a few cents for the phone calls.Rachael wrote:I don't want any internet-connected electronic assistant whatsoever. It's not what I have a PC for.
Don't get me an Amazon echo, don't enable Google Assistant on my phone, don't get me an iPhone with Siri... none of that. I'm not interested.
+1MartinHowe wrote:I despise Windows 10 for the usual reasons; GUI is terrible and telementry.
The childish pukings of Cortana during installation don't help either. I do not need to be baby-talked about WiFi.
But my biggest is "Why don't you use this app instead". An OS should sit quietly in the background and be my obedient slave. Nothing more. How *dare* it (the programmers) question my choices.
Talking about Paint.net, have you tried Pinta? It's almost an exact clone of this program, I think you should have a look at it (if you have not already done so, of course):MartinHowe wrote:And if there were a decent replacement for Paint.NET, and GZDB, I'd be on Linux already. I had no idea that *any* version of GZDB worked in Linux, though I've not done any mapping for a while, so must give it a try.
