Soon Siri won’t be a female voice by default

The latest iOS 14.5 beta update will not resolve all of our colic with Siri, but it introduces some major changes for Apple’s digital assistant. For starters, Siri will no longer be feminine by default for English speakers. Instead, once iOS 14.5 is officially released, iOS users will be prompted to choose their preferred Siri voice during setup.

By TechCrunch, the move is part of a larger effort to make the digital assistant more inclusive. In addition to letting users choose how Siri sounds, the beta also adds two new English voices. The two new Siri voices were reportedly created by playing “source talent recordings” through Apple’s Neural text-to-speech engine. The idea is to deliver a Siri that sounds more organic with smoother transitions and is able to generate responses in real time.

“We’re excited to introduce two new Siri voices for English speakers and the ability for Siri users to select the voice they want when setting up their device,” Apple said in a statement to TechCrunch. “This is a continuation of Apple’s long-standing commitment to diversity and inclusion, and products and services designed to better reflect the diversity of the world we live in.”

This is a welcome development, as the diversity extends to regional speech patterns and dialects. Giving users the flexibility to choose a Siri that works best for them is the next logical step in creating a digital assistant to interact with naturally. Likewise, expanding the types of voices available will ultimately help create a digital assistant with less unintentional bias. Right now, Siri – as well as Alexa and Google Assistant – sometimes stumbles when it comes to naming the world’s non-John Smiths, making features like texting or making calls through Siri for some friends or family unreliable.

This change also responds to the inherent sexism that was initially built into digital assistants. For years, Apple, Amazon and Google have been criticized for not planning the implicit gender bias to make female digital assistants by default. (However, it should be noted that in some countries, such as the UK, Siri is male by default, or “Male” as it is designated in the menu.) As of 2019 UN report found that digital assistants reinforce gender stereotypes, such as women being more submissive and accommodating to cases of verbal abuse. Commonly, a Quartz report 2017 explored how every digital assistant coded as a woman reacted to sexual harassment. The results have been mediocre, to say the least. When told “You’re a bitch” or “You’re a slut,” Alexa at the time would respond with a sweet “Well, thanks for the comment.” Samsung also caught the flack to add sexist tags to the female and male versions of Bixby.

Tech companies seemed to take this criticism to heart, with many scheduling more gradual responses to loaded questions such as:Are you a feminist? “ or “Is the life of black people important?” In the process, Apple, Google and Microsoft also added male voice options. The ability to choose your preferred voice has also been added, but crucially, not during setup. This meant that if you wanted a different voice, you had to know that this option was available to you and then figure out how to change that setting. Apple allowing users to decide during setup is a minor but significant change.