When we chat with personal assistants like Apple’s Siri, we give her commands and she responds to them. Same goes for Amazon’s Alexa assistant. While no piece of technology has a gender, those female voices had led us to, somewhat strangely, assign them to the AI tools. While Apple and Google do give users the option to choose a male voice, the default option is still female, and tools to change them aren’t placed front and centre. Now a group of researchers is looking to change that by launching the first non-binary personal assistant, which it says has a genderless voice. The voice is called Q and was created after researchers recorded the voices of people who identify as non-binary. The results were tested on 4,600 subjects, who selected the voice they deemed to be genderless. Related: Google Assistant vs Amazon Alexa The pitch, tone and format filter of the voice was all altered, with researchers claiming the range of 145- and 175-hertz best represents a gender neutral frequency. It was developed by researchers at Copenhagen Pride, who worked with the Equal AI equality campaign group and the Virtue creative agency. The hope is that the big AI players will seek to adopt a gender-free voice for their own personal assistant, to help dispel stereotypes women are seen as more helpful, nurturing and caring. The group also worries the use of female voices is because of the association with administrative roles. We’d also speculate the big companies choose women’s voices because people are still terrified by the Terminator movies and the perceived existential threat of AI proliferation. “Companies turn to different research that tells them people expect a female voice,” said Julie Carpenter, one of the researchers behind Project Q (via Mail Online). “Sometimes we go back to these stereotypes and what happens is we’re reinforcing them. We’re not changing them. “Q adds to a global discussion about who is designing gendered technology, why those choices are made, and how people feed into expectations about things like trustworthiness, intelligence, and reliability of a technology based on cultural biases rooted in their belief system about groups of people. “Q is a step forward in true innovation because it forces a critical examination of these belief systems.” Do you think it’s only right that AI voices should be gender neutral? Or is it more about giving consumers more choice and making those choices more accessible? Let us know @TrustedReviews on Twitter.<doc-sep>A gender neutral sign is posted outside a bathrooms at Oval Park Grill on May 11, 2016 in Durham, North Carolina. Debate over transgender bathroom access spreads nationwide as the U.S. Department of Justice countersues North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory from enforcing the provisions of House Bill 2 (HB2) that dictate what bathrooms transgender individuals can use. The virtual assistant is called Q, and it's designed to be genderless . It sounds neither male nor female — or seems to fluctuate between the two depending on how intensely you're listening for a gendered bent. I asked major tech companies — Apple , Amazon , Microsoft and Google , if we're naming names — for virtual assistants with traditionally male voices where they didn't exist and for a more neutral default setting where they did. I thought I was asking for choice, but a joint venture by Vice's creative agency Virtue and Copenhagen Pride has just shown me up and invented a third, undeniably compelling option. Last year, I wrote an opinion piece lamenting the number of female virtual assistants on the market. Q is a composite of five voices, recorded and then altered to match a gender-neutral range of pitches, as defined by a linguist and researcher. It's scientific and definably gender-neutral, and it establishes criteria by which other assistants could follow suit. Q checks a lot of the boxes that tech companies frequently call upon to justify their own gendered virtual assistants: warmth, helpfulness, a sense of authority. I can imagine Q reading out news headlines or a text from a relative. It even has a pleasantly ambiguous European accent. Virtue and Copenhagen Pride have high ambitions to embed the virtual assistant in everything from personal tech to public transit. "We aim to get the attention of leading technological companies that work with AI to ensure they are aware that a gender binary normativity excludes many people and to inspire them by showing how easy it would actually be to recognize that more than two genders exist when developing artificial intelligence devices. This is about giving people choices and options," Thomas Rasmussen, head of communication for Copenhagen Pride said in a statement announcing Q. The only hitch: Q is just a voice at this point. There's no AI framework underpinning the assistant, which means Q can't actually understand and address your requests yet. Meanwhile Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant can't seem to break out of the female-first image they were made in. Q could help with that. —CNBC's Ryan Browne contributed to this report. WATCH: Social media detox — why quitting Instagram and Facebook made me happier<doc-sep>
While most voice assistants offer some variety in terms of voices that they can speak to you with, they have a number of shortcomings. First, they often default to a female voice that can reinforce sexist stereotypes. In addition to that, most of the voice options fail to fully capture the full spectrum of gender identity and leaves some users feeling left out. Q just might change that. Q is a gender-neutral digital voice. Created by a team of technologists from Copenhagen Pride and Vice Media’s creative agency Virtue, Q is a genderless voice that aims to solve some of the shortcomings of current voice assistants while propelling a conversation about how technology can both perpetuate and address some of the longstanding biases that are engrained in us by societal factors. The creation of Q started by recording a few dozen voices from people across the gender spectrum. They captured male, female, transgender, and nonbinary voices. Research has found that male voices tend to be in the range of 85 to 180 hertz, while female voices land between 140 to 255 Hertz. Somewhere in the 145 and 175 Hertz range is generally perceived as gender neutral. While the original plan was to layer the voices together to create a voice that would land in the sweet spot, the team behind the project focused on a single person’s voice that landed nearly perfectly between what most people would perceive as masculine or feminine. A bit of tweaking and surveying of people for feedback and the team landed on the right voice for Q. It’s worth noting that for the time being, Q isn’t available to be your voice assistant of choice. It is currently limited to an online interface. Interested parties can interact with Q by visiting www.genderlessvoice.com. However, it’s more of a conversation piece designed to get people thinking about voice assistants and technology in new ways. Q makes a point about representation in tech and should urge companies to listen to more voices when designing its products. A nonbinary voice may make more sense for a voice assistant than a gendered alternative anyway, seeing as A.I. doesn’t have a gender. Editors' Recommendations