Q, the first assistant without gender

Q, the first assistant without gender

A campaign denounces gender stereotypes in virtual assistants

  At the end of last year, the agency Tangoº, along with the National Confederation of Women in Equality and the Association of Men for Gender Equality (AHIGE) launched a campaign to ask that virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa stop having a voice. woman. "Sometimes gender stereotypes are so established in our daily lives that they go unnoticed," they said.

A complaint that has been repeated by several countries and that has had echo. Virtue and Copenhagen Pride have created Q, the first neutral voice assistant that does not sound like a man or a woman.

  His first public words came earlier this month in Texas (United States) at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin. During the programming of Q, the researchers recorded 24 people who identified themselves as binary gender, transgender or fluid gender.

The objective of these tests was the search for a common point among all the voices and to reach neutrality with the mixture of them. However, it was not. Finally they chose a single voice that corresponded to a neutral gender rank, according to their research.

To reach that point, the researchers from Virtue and Copenhagen Pride asked 4,500 people where they fit the different voice tests. The winner was perceived by 50% of the respondents as a neutral voice, while 26% considered it closer to the masculine spectrum and 24% to the female spectrum.

Experts focus on several studies that show that the female voice is "closer and more pleasant when it comes to interacting". This is what the Indiana University professor, Karl MacDorman, defends.

In their research, the American expert along with his team of collaborators presented a series of recordings of male and female voices to people of both sexes, and then asked them to identify which ones they preferred while assessing how the participants responded to the voices. Both women and men said they perceived women's voices warmer.

The female voices were the most chosen by the users who made the tests for companies such as Apple, Amazon or Microsoft, both men and women. In addition, two independent studies revealed in 2017 that both men and women prefer a female voice because it is more "pleasant and understanding".

Currently, virtual assistants are becoming the perfect assistants to perform daily tasks. Among the best known include Siri (the virtual assistant of Apple), Cortana (Microsoft), Alexa (Amazon).