a bit airheaded.” And someone asked: “Where are the older, more mature voices that actually sound like someone that has been formally educated? If I wanted to listen to unintelligible teenagers, I’d be on YouTube.” A person said on Twitter that the new female-sounding voice “seems like Siri is trying to be cool.” Another said that both new voices “sound.
The new Siri voices are drawing some negative reactions in addition to the positive ones. “We’re trying to impute an entire identity onto this voice that’s not a person,” Holliday says. Siri is ageless and has no parents or hometown. A person’s speech patterns are the product of all sorts of environmental factors that shape who they are as an individual, including their age and ethnicity, and where they grew up. What's more, it's particularly difficult to assign a race or an accent to a synthetic voice.
According to Holliday, those features are sometimes associated with African Americans, but they're also typical of younger speakers from varied backgrounds. The new Siri voices have "some voice quality and intonational elements that are more likely to occur in the speech of African Americans," she says, but they're shared by some speakers of other groups.įor example, she says, the voices display more vocal fry-a creaky quality often heard at the ends of words-and a greater range of pitch than the old default voice. Many tiny cues in a person's speech offer hints at their background. (You can hear the passages in the clips below, which we generated separately for this article.)įrom a linguistic perspective, it's not easy to put the new Siri voices in a clear racial category, Holliday says. Holliday provided the text, which is frequently used by linguists. Consumer Reports generated the clips with an iPhone loaded with the beta version of iOS 14.5. By contrast, about three-fourths of participants said that Voice 1 and Voice 4, the old Siri voices, sound like white speakers. Of the 470 participants in her survey, a slim majority said that Voice 2 and Voice 3 sound like Black or multiracial speakers. She quickly put together a survey to gauge people’s reactions, gathering a race- and gender-representative sample of respondents. I asked Nicole Holliday, a professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, for help understanding how people might categorize the new voices. In the Siri section of the Settings app, the two additions will be labeled “Voice 2” and “Voice 3.” They will join the two existing American accented voices, and male- and female-sounding voices meant to represent other English-speaking accents, like Irish and Indian. The new voices will be available to iPhone users when Apple releases iOS 14.5 next week.
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In a statement, the company said only that the update is “a continuation of Apple’s longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion, and products and services that are designed to better reflect the diversity of the world we live in.” The voices are computer-generated, but each is based on recordings from a single voice actor the company did not provide any details about them. “If we can make the voice of authority one that doesn’t always sound like white people, then that is progress.”Īpple hasn't commented publicly on who these new voices are meant to represent. “When I think of Siri, I think of a voice that a lot of people hear, this omnipotent voice that’s also a voice of authority,” Williams says. Widely heard, trusted voices-everything from radio hosts to voice-over actors-have long been perceived as a particular subset of white people, and often male. “When we think of racial representation, we usually think visually, not phonetically,” Williams says.
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Today’s movies and TV shows are more likely than before to feature Black people in significant roles, according to UCLA’s annual Hollywood diversity report-but the same change hasn’t reached many of the voices that we hear, she says. That’s why diversifying their voices is important, says Sherri Williams, a professor who studies race and media at American University. As they become increasingly powerful and appear in more devices-not just phones and tablets, but also smart speakers and cars-their voices have become a symbol of professionalism. “It says that Black identity and African American identity have value, have legitimacy, and can be trusted here as a partner in searching for information.”įor many people, digital assistants like Siri or Alexa are daily guides to modern life. “A young Black voice owning that role in a lot of people’s homes is incredibly powerful,” Allen says.
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