October 4, 2011

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She & Him

parislemon:

Peter Kafka’s “Occam’s Razor” thought as to why the Siri voice is female and not male: because it would remind people too much of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Cute. But wrong.

Actually, the voice varies from country to country. The UK version, for example, uses a man’s voice. I know this because I’m in England and got a demo of the feature here.

Also awesome: Siri didn’t work for me when UK English was turned on. When I switched to US English, it worked perfectly. It understands accents. 

Varying the voice by country is very smart.  BMW’s German customers demanded a product recall when they debuted GPS navigation directions spoken in a synthetic female voice.  Presumably, Male Germans couldn’t tolerate being told what to do by a woman. This was studied in depth by a UX Design professor at Stanford, Cliff Nass.

Comments (View) and 38 notes

38 notes

  1. mortgage-repayment--calculator reblogged this from parislemon
  2. digital-frames reblogged this from parislemon
  3. nhmortgagebroker reblogged this from parislemon
  4. sutterbomb reblogged this from parislemon and added:
    Scary. parislemon on Siri.
  5. simonrain reblogged this from parislemon and added:
    keynote’s live coverage yesterday,...pretty impressive.
  6. april-c-c reblogged this from parislemon
  7. nicolekirstiesmith reblogged this from parislemon and added:
    I wonder how this works if you have an Americanised Australian accent? Do I chose
  8. hunterpryor reblogged this from cacioppo
  9. cacioppo reblogged this from thegongshow and added:
    Reminds me of one of Google’s now-explicit rationales for GOOG-411. From this new article:
  10. thegongshow reblogged this from parislemon and added:
    very smart. BMW’s German customers demanded a product recall when they debuted GPS navigation directions spoken in a...
  11. seldo said: If Siri understands accents, then me and my unusual half-British, half-American accent are fucked.
  12. parislemon posted this

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