Ann Syrdal, Who Helped Give Computers a Female Voice, Dies at 74 (nytimes.com) 29
Ann Syrdal, a psychologist and computer science researcher who helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women, laying the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, died on July 24 at her home in San Jose, Calif. She was 74. From a report: Her daughter Kristen Lasky said the cause was cancer. As a researcher at AT&T, Dr. Syrdal was part of a small community of scientists who began developing synthetic speech systems in the mid-1980s. It was not an entirely new phenomenon; AT&T had unveiled one of the first synthetic voices, developed at its Bell Labs, at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. But more than 40 years later, despite increasingly powerful computers, speech synthesis was still relatively primitive. "It just sounded robotic," said Tom Gruber, who worked on synthetic speech systems in the early '80s and went on to create the digital assistant that became Siri when Apple acquired it in 2010.
To be fair... (Score:1)
It was also called Siri before apple acquired it.
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Right. It was the pronunciation of SRI.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)
S.A.M. (Score:4, Informative)
In case you are wondering what text to speech sounded like in the 80s, the Atari and Commodore 64 computers had S.A.M. [youtube.com]
I remember being pretty impressed at the time...
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Or MacinTalk [youtube.com]. ...and it's still being used. [youtube.com]
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No, please. If you want to know what text-to-speech sounded like in the 80s get a TI-99 with the TMS5200. The terminal emulator actually had text-to-speech built in, which was terrible. But it fit on a cartridge with maybe 8K of program data.
The synthesizer could sound pretty good, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Female Voice? (Score:3)
Actually, I use a male voice for Siri. This way I can easily tell the difference between a Google voice assistant and Siri.
One piece of trivia I remember hearing during a presentation on voice assistants in fighter planes was that male pilots tended to pay more attention to female voices than male voices. There were some reasons given such as male pilots would see a male voice in a plane as more of a challenge to the pilots authority and be quicker to ignore it. Not sure I buy that, but it was entertaining.
Re:Female Voice? (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe the idea is that most information is conveyed in the higher frequencies, and female voices emphasize the higher frequencies, making them more intelligible in noisy conditions. This would be why people who are losing hearing -- typically at higher frequencies -- have trouble understanding speech even if they can hear it.
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The number of formants is actually independent of the pitch of the voice, which, as you pointed out, is usually higher for women. It means that guys with higher-pitched voices will usually sound different than women with lower-pitched voices, e
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That's a common misconception. Sound frequencies work on a logarithmic scale. From middle A on a piano to one octave higher is 440 Hz to 880 Hz. Going up another octave doubles that 1760 Hz. Another octave is 3520 Hz. And so on. I've lost most of my high-end hearing from having worked closely with sonars (most operate b
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Automated voices are usually female when speaking English or Japanese.
Automated voices in Spanish, French, and Chinese are usually male.
It can be jarring when listening to a soothing automated female phone voice giving instructions, and then a sudden "Nueve para español" in a gruff male voice.
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I've heard that a big part of the reason for using female voices is that they trigger a less aggressive response - e.g. people take a lot longer to start swearing at their GPS navigator when it keeps saying "You failed to follow my instructions, recalculating..." in a female voice rather than a male voice.
It's interesting to note that that's claimed to be the case for both female and male users. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that men are far more likely to use displays of aggression to coerc
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Good for you. And what do you do if someone oversteps their authority, getting in your face trying to make you do something?
Given your phrasing I suspect you get aggressive back - and that it tends to work.
Obviously no behavioral claim applies to 100% of people, but watch a bunch of people arguing at the bar, or even in a board meeting - men are far more likely than women to show "aggressive" behavior when trying to compel cooperation. Raised voices. Talking over others. Getting in people's personal spac
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I hate to break it to you, but rational people don't exist.
We're all irrational animals - though with practice and discipline we can learn to think rationally for brief periods. Particularly about things that we don't have a vested personal interest in - for example almost nobody can think rationally about their personal relationships, though many can convince themselves otherwise. The easiest person to deceive is after all yourself.
This brings back fond... (Score:2)
...memories of my roommate's old Amiga in the 1980s, which had a synthetic voice that could recite typed phrases. We used it to create an amusing telephone answering machine reply..."Congratulations, hume-an, you have interfaced with a sophisticated compUting device...."
In those days people were fairly disconcerted to have to respond to a robotic voice, and the replies were often hilarious if they didn't just hang up.
Destiny. (Score:4, Insightful)
She had a name that was homonymous with "answer doll".
Where are the sexy sci-fi female voices? (Score:1)
Jane Barbe (Score:1)
So is this is the Bitch who ... (Score:2)
Wikipedia article? (Score:2)
Does anyone know of someone with the proper skills in writing whom I might contact to either write such an article or assist me in doing so?