Reading Ann Laurie’s post reminded me of the obvious: being aware of the experience of others takes constant effort. And, (as I wrote about one example here), the failure to do so amidst white male self-assumed universality leads to harm in just about any domain — more for those dismissed, but non-zero for the presumed pre-MOTUs as well.
With that as pre-amble, check out this from CNN Money:
All virtual assistants have to deal with inappropriate comments and questions. From seasoned vets like Siri and Google Now, to the rash of new specialists with names like Amy, Molly, Mia and Robin.
When Microsoft launched Cortana in 2014, a good chunk of early queries were about her sex life, according to Microsoft’s Deborah Harrison.
It turns out people feel very comfortable talking freely with text and voice assistants. Humanizing the bots with names, faked emotions, personalities and genders (mostly female) helps build trust with users.
Microsoft has its corporate head in the right place, at least on this one:
Cortana is clearly identified as a woman. She has a female avatar and is voiced by human woman Jen Taylor. But the writers are conscious about avoiding female-assistant stereotypes. Cortana isn’t self-deprecating and avoids saying sorry.
“We wanted to be very careful that she didn’t feel subservient in any way … or that we would set up a dynamic we didn’t want to perpetuate socially,” said Harrison.
But the ‘bros and any MRA/PUA trogs need not worry. The market will make sure that their all too familiar sex/power fantasies will find their representation in our brave new era.
Not all assistants will take the same firm approach. Robin Labs, which makes a voice-assistant for drivers, thinks there might be a market customizing personalities. CEO Ilya Eckstein says there is a high demand for an assistant personality that’s “more intimate-slash-submissive with sexual undertones.”
All of which to say is that it’s easy to call out, say, Chris Christie, when he talks of beating Hilary Clinton’s rear end. As all here know, it’s far harder to combat the influence of the jabs and gestures that pervade daily life, well below the level of explicit speech, up to and including the robot in your GPS.
How this post may be read in the context of Hilary Clinton’s candidacy and (some of) its discontents? You make the call.
Image: Jan Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding, 1434.
Roger Moore
I wonder how much people’s desire to have a digital assistant that acts like a subservient woman comes from their inability to have a subservient flesh-and-blood woman as an assistant.
Chyron HR
Am I dumb or is “Cortana” a video game character, not a real application?
Cacti
@Chyron HR:
Both.
Cortana the app is based on the Cortana character from the Halo games, where she was an AI.
Frankensteinbeck
@Cacti:
Wait… does that mean I could have a GlaDOS assistant who constantly fumes and snarks about not being in charge, and frequently glitches and says creepy random things? The whole idea of having an AI assistant based off of our favorite video game characters is awesome.
WarMunchkin
That’s what freaks me out about Cortana. Who decided that repurposing a video game character was a good idea? Her character itself isn’t exactly the pinnacle of feminist character design, either.
I’ll be honest – the deluge of female virtual assistants freak me out. I’d rather have a voice that sounds like an ’80s robot – arguably male, but more something that sounds demonstrably non-human.
Linda Featheringill
I think that you’re correct in saying that it takes some effort to empathize with those affected by our actions. And it isn’t always gender or race issues. And it isn’t always white males who are the perps. I have often been surprised by how my words have affected males around me, often when I meant no harm. There has also been an issue with generational differences. And some phrases just have different meanings in the white culture than in the black culture.
Perhaps we all should seek more feedback as we wend our way through the day.
Cacti
@Frankensteinbeck:
I’m waiting for someone to make a Hal 9000 app.
Mike J
Decent people take note of how a person they’re dating treats people in service industries. Will people take note of how others treat their robots? Should they?
Frankensteinbeck
@Cacti:
I think that one would sell big.
@WarMunchkin:
Robot voices are also good. I support variety. I think we should have ALL the options, for whoever wants what.
Brachiator
I guess he would have been better off just talking about kicking her ass.
? Martin
@Roger Moore: Should also be noted that while these tools are currently focused on relatively mundane tasks (subservient assistant), the goal by all of these companies is to have them really become superior assistants – able to do things that we can’t otherwise do for ourselves. You can see some of that peeking through in a few of the ads where these tools are advertised as being able to answer questions that we don’t ourselves know – mostly just as search engines, but also as computing engines. I’ve caught my son asking Siri what the molecular weight of some element was while doing his homework. All of these companies have health platforms that they hope will hook into EMR systems, and so they may in the future be able to answer questions like ‘how am I doing on lowering my blood pressure’ or ‘what’s the best way for me to lose weight’. I can see them getting into doing that with financial data as well.
At that point the question then becomes “How much have people been influenced by having the daily subject-matter expert in their life be a woman?”
Bobby Thomson
@Frankensteinbeck: this. OMG, this.
? Martin
@WarMunchkin: I don’t know about the others (but I assume it would hold for them as well) but you can change Siri’s gender and accent. In english you can have male or female with American, British, or Australian accents.
I doubt that any of these companies would go with a robotic voice since there are a lot of studies showing that people respond much better to a human voice.
Mike J
Related, interesting wikipedia entry. Bitching Betty
Punchy
You (or hopefully, Siri) should tell him that elements dont have “molecular weights”. They have atomic masses/weights. Molecules have molecular weights.
Tom Levenson
@Linda Featheringill: Of course. It isn’t just about gender or race; we are all subject to the obvious validity of our own perspective to some degree. But the rubber hits the road when power and power disparities are at play — which is what caught my eye in a story about, in effect, reproducing that high-low power stereotype in our robots.
Brendan in Charlotte
@Cacti: but would it only say, I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that…?
Brendan in Charlotte
@? Martin: I’d take a robot voice, as long as it sounded like the Cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica…or Twiggy from Buck Rogers
kc
No lady post is complete without a grace note from a man. :)
chopper
@Frankensteinbeck:
i’d get sick of hearing about the goddamn cake all the time tho.
retiredeng
@Cacti: That’s not a good idea. HAL 9000 is flawed and eventually would try to find ways to do you in.
Betty Cracker
My car’s GPS system lets the user choose the gender and accent of the voice that gives directions. I chose a posh British accent and refer to “him” as “Nigel.” My husband’s GPS system has a female voice that gives turn-by-turn directions. One time when we were lost and the voice hadn’t piped up in a while, my husband said, “Where’s that woman who tells me where to go?” And I said, “I’m right here!”
? Martin
@Mike J: Video games are likely to become a bit of a laboratory in that respect. My son and I are each playing through Fallout 4 with different role-plays, so following different story lines. It’s really interesting when my daughter (who is also playing but is well behind us) and my wife comment on what we are doing – and we get into some surprisingly long discussions about the decisions we make. It’s all very coarse and artificial still (after all you do shoot about 98% of the people you meet) but as these games continue to advance, it’s getting increasingly easy to build real stories and present real moral decisions. The Last of Us takes that a few steps further, and I don’t doubt that in the next decade we will get games that challenge players even more.
I imagine a lot of the classic ethical dilemmas (lifeboat, etc.) will be played out in future games, Kobayashi Maru style, with players making difficult decisions and then being able to watch how the in-game AI builds consequences in a non-deterministic manner. I imagine it will be unavoidable judging people based on their behavior toward AIs, simply because our ability to suspend disbelief is limited. That is to say, it’s inevitable we will routinely forget that the AIs aren’t human, therefore people will be judged.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
Just so long as she doesn’t flood the area with a deadly neurotoxin.
Geeno
I would love to have a snarky, semi-abusive GlaDOS assistant.
gex
Watching the Australian Open last month I was noticing how IBM’s Watson is male, while GPS and assistant type AIs are female. Not terribly subtle, tech industry. Experts are male. Assistants are female.
Roger Moore
@WarMunchkin:
There’s actually a surprising amount of genuine research that goes into designing the “personality” of the virtual assistants. IIRC, they try to make them sound human because people react to human voices better than robotic voices and are more likely to want to keep using them. Similarly, they change the gender of the voice depending on cultural variables. ISTR, for example, that many countries default to giving GPS devices male voices because research shows that drivers in those countries are more likely to follow directions from a male voice than a female one.
gex
I think a thing I posted ended up in moderation.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: I’m sure the percentage is above 1%
Mike J
@gex: You can’t be a progressive in moderation.
Paul in KY
@WarMunchkin: How about like the robot from Lost in Space? I always liked it.
Paul in KY
@Cacti: “I’m sorry, Cacti, I’m afraid I can’t restore the hard drive I erased”
cmorenc
@Betty Cracker:
Sometimes when I’m going somewhere with my car gps turned on, but my destination is somewhere I don’t really need its help to find, I’ll change the language setting to one I have little knowledge of, such as japanese or danish. It’s kind of fun listening to it talking gibberish at me. So why have the gps turned on at all if I know how to get where I’m going? B/c if I have an arrival time goal, it gives me a constantly updated projection of my expected arrival time based on how far along I am so far.
Tom Levenson
@gex: Went looking for it. Didn’t find it.
Betty Cracker
@gex: I fished it out. For some reason, we can’t say “Watson.”
@Tom Levenson: I beat you to it! :)
gex
@Tom Levenson: Thanks.
I noticed when watching the US Open that IBM’s Watson is the one AI I can think of given a male voice by default. Watson is of course an expert system, intended to provide us with information that we can’t gather easily by ourselves unlike the more mundane assistant systems that tend to be given women’s voices by default.
gex
@Betty Cracker: Thank you! After Tom’s post I tried again, and that attempt went into moderation and it can stay there.
WarMunchkin
@? Martin:
What about for people who hate human interaction and sit around reading Balloon Juice all day?
Applejinx
@Linda Featheringill: Think about how well it’d work to tell a young male virgin he’s ‘nice’. There’s a powerful Western social expectation that males have to conquer and fight each other for dominance, and if for any reason you’re not awesome at that, punishment of various sorts awaits.
This is how we get Trumps and Christies. Even we at Balloon Juice are delighted when those guys give Jeb? Bush a dickslapping.
I’m reminded about how Guy Kawasaki will tell you, if you have a business plan, run it past at least one woman. That’s because men are hardwired and socially programmed to approve of your business idea if you’re trying to kill another company, no matter what you’re actually doing. The rivalry reads as ‘strength’ and we switch off and see nothing else. Ask a woman and she’s less likely to be immediately entranced by who you want to kill, and will ask ‘but what do you do?’.
Linnaeus
@Cacti:
Beat me to it. HAL rocks. This is my screen saver.
Brachiator
@gex:
I thought that the default UK Siri voice was male.
The computer voice on Star Trek was female. I suspect that this has influenced a lot of the techies who have worked on the voice for AI devices.
Roger Moore
@gex:
Part of the problem is that most industries, including tech, are trying to deliver what their customers expect, rather than trying to change people’s expectations in a progressive direction. So they tend to make experts male and assistants female because that’s what they expect people to expect, which naturally winds up reinforcing those expectations.
Note, though, that those expectations are strongly culturally derived. As I mentioned above, some countries default to having male GPS devices because they don’t think male drivers will listen to a female giving them directions. I had in interesting conversation with a head of a company’s Japanese service division, and he said that in Japan they break the standard practice everywhere else I know of by having mostly women as service engineers. I was surprised to hear that, because brute physical strength is often important for service engineers, which is why it tends to be a male dominated field. He said that it’s because Japanese are often angry when something goes wrong, but their rules of politeness mean they’re less likely to be abusive toward women who come to deal with the problem than men.
Linnaeus
@retiredeng:
Only one of the HAL 9000s was flawed. There were three total: two at Mission Control and one on the Discovery.
And then, of course, there was SAL in 2010.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I’m not sure if it’s an urban legend, but apparently the warning voices in airline cockpits are female, because the pilots pay more attention. That may be a function of that job still be predominantly male, though, so a female voice would be unusual and bring more attention.
Brachiator
@gex:
I thought that the default UK Siri voice was male.
The computer voice on Star Trek was female. I suspect that this has influenced a lot of the techies who have worked on the voice for AI devices.
ETA: trying to avoid the comment disappearing into the ether.
Peale
@WarMunchkin: Those people will be directed by their GPS using images of pets.
mapaghimagsik
I’d like Jarvis, ala ‘Iron Man’
But wow. Just wow. I guess I’m not surprised, but I am appalled at the idea that people need a phone assistant that calls them ‘Daddy’
bartholomew
Probably most here realize that conservatism’s main ‘offer’ is control of women, and that it has been this way since the beginning of civilization. It is a very real offering, though the cons cannot directly say it (yet). The abortion issue is a facet of this war on women … there is no mention of abortion in the Bible, though herbal abortifacents are older than the advent of Christ. Women are the main anti-abortion supporters too, go figure. It’s a made-up issue.
Liberalism freed women from subservience by recognizing their natural human rights … yet almost every woman I know is a ‘conservative’ at this point. LOL. I am originally from Texas though, which skews things I’m sure. But almost every OTHER woman I know is ‘leftist’ who has recently gone tribal howler monkey.
In fact, just 4 years away from the 100-year mark of women’s suffrage in America, I truly do not know a single woman who call themselves ‘liberal’ … it’s perceived as too weak for their brand of coffee or something. Lot of ‘leftists’ though. It is quite incredible.
It’s all about where you’re standing, I guess…
C.V. Danes
It’s important to note that these so-called assistants are merely clever ways that companies use to get you to hand over more of your personal data.
The first thing I did when upgrading to Windows 10 was disable Cortana. Not comfortable with sharing my life with Microsoft for any reason.
C.V. Danes
@bartholomew: It would seem that the only thing a liberal despises more than a conservative is another liberal. Just look at the Clinton vs. Sanders battle going on in these comment threads over differences that are largely irrelevant when compared to Clinton/Sanders vs. any, and I do mean any, Republican.
catclub
@Betty Cracker: I think having Brian Blessed yelling instructions would be fun.
Or random changes. Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal or multiple voices of Meryl Streep.
Mike J
@? Martin: In video games you’re consciously making a choice, and people will play good or evil just to see different storylines. My question is more about the invisible tech around us. Most people don’t think about how they’ll address Siri. Is it an indication of how they treat people? Some people say it’s just software and don’t put emotion in to talking to it. Some people say please and thank you, even though it does not matter at all.
Amir Khalid
Nearly 50 comments in, and no one has brought up that movie from a few years ago: Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johanssen in a bittersweet boy-meets-Siri romance.
otmar
“Hi there, I’m Eddie, you ship board computer…”
Paul in KY
@bartholomew: I’m not completely sure I agree with your ‘from beginning of civilization’. Probably just hyperbole there.
IMO, all kinds of political systems up to 19th century pretty much assumed/condoned subjugation of women.
Mike J
@gex:
It used to be thought that warning voices in airplanes should be female because people pay more attention to them. See the wiki article I linked above.
catclub
@C.V. Danes: @? Martin:
Ah, this could turn out very amusing – to those whose money is not lost by taking their advice.
FlipYrWhig
@catclub: GORDON’S ALIVE?!
Redshift
We had an advance demo at work a few months back of the Amazon Echo (aka “Alexa”), and a good friend and great manager asked the Amazon sales guy pitching it why these subservient computer personalities always have female names and voices. He didn’t have any answer. (It didn’t help that he was an old-school salesman type, and was already mostly ignoring her.)
Matt McIrvin
Many people beat me to the observation that Cortana is specifically named after a videogame character… who was represented in-game as a hologram of a practically naked blue woman, weirdly sexualized in a way that is never really justified in the story.
Not only that, a major plot element in the series was that, as an artificial intelligence, Cortana was vulnerable to “rampancy”, a type of malfunction in which she behaves erratically and eventually dies. In the latest one, she seems to have avoided rampancy but is trying to conquer the galaxy; she’s become the main villain!
This pattern isn’t universal: in Destiny, the “virtual assistant” character was originally voiced by Peter Dinklage. Many fans hated his line readings and he probably became too expensive to get for the DLC, so they eventually replaced him with prolific voice actor Nolan North, doing what I can only describe as an American C3PO.
bin Lurkin'
Mudd’s Women is the scenario, I can see that punishment being used for minor violations, your personal assistant turns into an enthusastic nagger.
Brandon
58 comments in and not yet one mention of the Spike Jonze film “Her”?
Ooops, I guess there is now.
Redshift
@bartholomew: Meh. I think the data are skewed by the several-decade conservative demonization of the word “liberal.” Wingnuts like to tell themselves that they’re the majority because more people call themselves “conservative” than “liberal,” even though more people agree with the liberal position on most issues. It’s also fueled the popularity of “progressive.”
Mike J
@Redshift:
Smart salesmen bring a sales engineer with them to actually answer the questions.
Redshift
@WarMunchkin:
We aren’t going to like any voice output, and would rather read. A robotic voice will be annoying, a human-like voice will be unwanted human contact.
ruemara
@Mike J: I think so. No matter who, or what you deal with, you should have moral core that dictates how you deal with anything that even apes sentience. I personally believe that doing otherwise conditions you to accepting bad actions.
It’s odd this is coming up as I read passages from The Exile by Ames & Taibbi circulating on the twitters now.
Redshift
@Mike J:
That would have been a good idea. The meeting was seemed like a waste of time to me, but apparently it worked; we have some people trying it out.
FlipYrWhig
@bin Lurkin’: FWIW, I badly misread that final word.
Matt McIrvin
In science fiction from the Sixties and Seventies into the Eighties, there was this strain of making computers and robots either talk like effeminate/fussy/stereotypically gay men, or like butch women. I think it was a crude way of “othering” them by having them break gender norms; they may have been building on older written SF in which robots were sometimes described as presenting as completely androgynous. I’d put HAL 9000, C3PO, the computer from Barbarella, even KITT from Knight Rider in the first category, and the voice Majel Barrett did for the Enterprise computer on Star Trek in the second.
In reality, for a while, it seemed as if computer voices were more likely to be hyper-gendered: either sexy women or macho baritone male voices. But I think Siri and Google Now are going more for a Majel Barrett effect.
CONGRATULATIONS!
What if I want a subservient black man’s voice? Field or house nigger option, of course. Are there lines that people aren’t going to cross?
I don’t think so. I think I get my virtual black slave boy, my virtual Japanese geisha girl, whatever fucked up thing I want.
Put nicely, this is a use of technology that can’t possibly do anything positive for the human condition. In fact, I don’t think it would be too much effort to make the argument that it is dragging us right to our well-deserved doom.
FlipYrWhig
@Matt McIrvin: The shipboard computer in Alien is called “Mother,” right?
Amir Khalid
@Brandon:
Great minds think alike, but fools never differ.
mapaghimagsik
Wait, C3PO is gay? I thought he was just British.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I’ve always wondered why the default GPS voices are almost always female, because, like, men don’t like taking driving directions from real women, so why would they want to take driving directions from a robot woman?
ruemara
I kinda prefer the androgynous voices.
@mapaghimagsik: same thing.
FlipYrWhig
@mapaghimagsik: “Oh dear!”
IIRC the Mad Magazine Star Wars parody referred to him as a “fag robot.”
qwerty42
@WarMunchkin: What about Clippy? Or whatever it was called.
catclub
@Mike J:
The only salesman who was ever in our house, that I can remember, (I was maybe 5) was the Rainbow Vacuum man.
I have two memories. It picked up pennies. and there were later comments by my mom that my dad had his eye on
the assistant saleswoman.
catclub
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: So my idea for Brian Blessed to start yelling when you miss a turn might be just right?
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
“In reality?” Where?
Also, I think you are overthinking and forcing your SF categorizations.
mapaghimagsik
@FlipYrWhig:
I guess I didn’t notice he was gay because he had a red arm.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
I’ve tried having SIRI work as an Australian, Kiwi or English girl, but she doesn’t understand me.
Try and call “Mom” – it’s frustrating. American SIRI works fine.
bin Lurkin'
I read an article some time ago by the mother of an autistic boy practically raving about how Siri was helping her son…
jl
If I ever get a digital assistant in some stupid smart phone or computer, I want a gruff voice (either male or female, I don’t care) that responds “You again, WTF now?”
“Jesus effing Christ, I did that for you yesterday.”
“Hey shit for brains, go search that shit yourself, I’m busy. Here’s the damn search words, Yeesh”.
So, that makes me, and I would guess Cole. How many others? There may be an untapped market out there.
“That is so stupid, I otta punch you in the neck. Would if I could. Next year they might program me to do that. So watch the eff out, goofball.”
That kind assistant would keep me on my toes.
jl
@bin Lurkin’: Thanks. Interesting story. I guess nice digital assistants have their uses.
Matt McIrvin
@CONGRATULATIONS!: That possibility was already explored in a number of more or less satirical SF novels: John Sladek’s Tik-Tok is probably the most acid one. Also Rudy Rucker’s Software/Wetware etc. series and, I think, one or two Philip K. Dick novels.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: I’m thinking of the really early uses of sampled voices in appliances and such, the brief 1980s fad for talking cars particularly.
Though technical limitations probably dictated some of that: with digitally synthesized voices it was easier to do really low pitches, so those were male-ish voices. Though they often sounded more inhuman than male.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
My GPS choice is the Aussie female, whose name I forget but naturally, she’s Sheila to me. The spouse and kid can’t stand Sheila and are always yelling at me to turn her off, particularly after the fourth consecutive “recalculating.” I sometimes set it to Korean or Arabic or Ukrainian, just for the sheer amusement of it.
What I really want is a Mister T voice. “I pity the fool who doesn’t take exit 254B to the right in a mile and a half. ‘Recalculate,’ my ass. Turn around and get it right this time, sucker! Do you want to get there or not?!?”
And so forth.
C.V. Danes
@? Martin:
The paranoid Orwellian in me doesn’t think it will be all that altruistic. The ‘Dreadful Rule’ applies: Anything that can be misused will be misused.
trollhattan
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
My hunch is the female frequency range carries better/is more understandable in noisy environments, but I’d gladly defer to an audio engineer on what’s doubtless more complicated than just that. Figure there’s a reason Bell Labs always chose a woman for the time lady and the early automated operators, but of course telephones worked on a very narrow frequency range so the comparison to today is imperfect.
Gravenstone
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: SO you’re suggesting that SIRI (in your experience) not only can speak in assorted accents, but appears to preferentially understand the same accents? I’d think that quite odd, if true.
IdahoFlaneuse
@? Martin: That is so good to know. I was just telling MrFlaneur that I missed Lee the Australian on our old GPS.
Paul in KY
@mapaghimagsik: I always thought of Hal 9000 like the psychiatrist who has to talk to murderous psychos. Very calm & reasonable voice. So soothing…
Paul in KY
@jl: Cole could make some bucks doing the voice for that one!
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: I wouldn’t mind a Snoop Dogg voiced one.
trollhattan
@Paul in KY:
Heh. Could have a submenu: 1) loaded 2) really loaded.
Mike J
@trollhattan:
Telephone operators were women, so it made sense that the automated operators would be too.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@catclub:
I think it’s TomTom that has a contract with Blessed.
*checks* Why, yes, it is!
Feathers
@Paul in KY: I think there was one at one point. I sortof wished I had a car, just to drive around with Snoop giving the directions. Saw an interview once where he talked about recording all the bits of talk he had to do.
This whole discussion is reminding me of figure skaters – a dance pair (Meryl and Charlie?) was asked who did the counting and calling out the next move. (Pairs and dance couples always have one partner who counts and calls.) I don’t remember who was “in charge,” but the reason why was that their coach asked them if they were more worried about getting in trouble with their mom or dad. They both had the same answer, and that gender gave the orders on ice. Thought that was an interesting way to make the pick.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Back in the DOS days, I set up my office computer to require a password.
The prompt was nuqneH.
El Caganer
And the cycle will continue…..in response to feminized robots, we’ll get MRA/PUA bots (“Turingbros”)…..and it will never end…..
henqiguai
@WarMunchkin(#5):
Maybe it’s dated (was a very long time ago) I interviewed for a position at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab. One of the things they were working on was voice synthesis in fighter cockpits. The issue was that with the advent of heads-up displays and all the (at the time flashy new digital instrumentation) fighter pilots were reaching visual overload; so they were working on implementing voice synthesis for certain cockpit functions. Research showed that a female voice was the most efficacious; neither females nor, especially, males would ignore a female voice in an imperious mode. Also, the higher pitch of a female voice would seem to be better able to penetrate through ambient noise.
Then too, aren’t the bulk of techies doing the development and implementation still primarily male? personally, I’d rather a female or female-biased but otherwise neutral voice beaming in my ear than some baritoned male (but I’m biased that way).
ETA: Moderation?! Was it ‘ambient’? Sheesh!
Elliott
Anne.
Paul in KY
@Feathers: I’m going to have to find that one.