Apple offers users a voice that is neither male nor female – Corriere.it

Her name is Quinn, no wonder A name of Irish origin for years attributed to both boys and girls. Siri’s new voice intentionally takes this name to represent a voice assistant that has an unrecognizable “gender-neutral” voice in gender identity. After years of female voices, both for Apple and for other competitors like Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft Cortana, it’s the Apple company that has been particularly bitten one step further, also in terms of inclusion. Last year he had started doing some work Experiments with the voices of black dubbers, also due to the influence of a movement like Black Lives Matter. This time, another option will give the possibility to set a sound that in some moments, according to users, will sound to a woman, and in others to a man. In an official press release, the Cupertino company said: “We are excited to announce the launch of this new voice, giving users more and more options, even in the voice assistant to speak to. Millions of people depend on Siri today, and as a result we’ve worked hard for it Make this feature as personal as possible“.

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for the sound gender discrimination, which takes an increasingly comprehensive perspective, Apple hasn’t provided details about the implementation or who it really belongs to, while explaining how it can be added to your device. At the moment it is available Only for English speaking users, who have beta version of iOS 15.4 They will be able to select the so-called «Option 5», which will appear in the voice assistant selection interface. In addition to updating Siri, the company also promised to make other improvements related to the service such as some system fixes and the removal of some bugs.

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With this new option, Apple wants to offer a variety of options, depending on an individual’s inclinations, identity and sexual orientation, to cover every possible preference. It all started with the introduction of a male voice to bring users closer to using the voice assistant. Currently there are more female and male voices, standard and African American for American users, to which is now added what is intended to be a kind of universal sound. for maximum impartiality, The different options are defined as 1, 2, 3, etc.…without having any description of the type of sound, other than what users can perceive, the definition will depend on the individual’s perception. Starting next March, this service will likely also be expanded to other languages ​​that have featured Siri so far, and thus to other countries as well.