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Apple is adding two new voices to Siri’s English offerings and removing the default selection of “ female voice ” in the latest iOS beta. This means that each person setting up Siri will choose a voice for themselves and the voice assistant will no longer be female by default, a topic that has come up a bit when it comes to prejudices in voice interfaces in recent years. years.
The beta version should be available now and available to program participants.
I believe this is the first of these wizards to make the completely agnostic choice without any default selection. This is a positive step forward as it allows people to choose their preferred voice without the default bias coming into play. The two new voices also bring much needed variety to Siri’s voices, offering more. diversity in the sound and pattern of speech to a user choosing a voice that speaks to him.
In some countries and languages, Siri already uses a male voice by default. But this change makes the choice of users for the first 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,” a statement from Apple read. “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.”
Both new voices use source talent recordings which are then played back through Apple’s Neural text-to-speech engine, allowing the voices to flow more organically through phrases that are actually generated on the fly.
I heard the new voices and they sound pretty fantastic, with natural inflection and smooth transitions. They will be a great addition for iOS users. I will be incorporating some examples here after the beta is released.
This latest beta also upgrades Siri voices in Ireland, Russia and Italy to Neural TTS, bringing the total number of voices using the new technology to 38. Siri now handles 25 billion requests per month out of over 500 million devices and supports 21 languages in 36 countries.
The new voices are available to English speaking users around the world, and Siri users can select a personal voice preference in 16 languages.
It seems very likely that these two new voices are just the first expansion of Siri’s voice selections. Greater diversity in voice, tone and regional dialect can only be a positive development in how inclusive smart devices feel. Over the past few years, we’ve finally started to see some movement from Amazon, Google, and Apple to aggressively correct situations where assistants have revealed bias in their responses to queries using negative or abusive language. The improvements there, along with queries on social justice topics and overall accessibility improvements are incredibly essential as we continue to see an explosion of native voice or voice interfaces. These types of choices are important, especially on a scale of hundreds of millions of people.
Article updated to note that in some countries and languages Siri currently defaults to a male voice.
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