When Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, first released in 2011 it was the first voice recognition tool with basic contextual knowledge of user information. Fast forward to 2022, most consumer electronic brands have some kind of digital virtual assistant within their products. As brands explore how the voice of this virtual assistant can engage audiences, it will become increasingly critical to create differentiated voice experiences to set themselves apart from their competition.
One issue that some consumers notice is the uniformity of these virtual assistant voices (typically mono-tonal, somewhat robotic sounding female voices), making it difficult to distinguish between brand and assistant. Industry leaders in virtual assistant technology like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri relay information with a default female voice. Likewise, automated telephone directories typically have a similar guidance voice.
Amazon found that test users of their Alexa product responded more strongly to a female voice than the male equivalent. Microsoft, while developing their Cortana virtual assistant, found a female voice to best embody the expected qualities of an assistant: helpful, supportive and trustworthy.
However, the real reason that most of the voices we associate with faceless artificial intelligence are female, is that the original text-to-speech systems were trained mostly on female voices. This was due to early developers considering that women tend to articulate vowel sounds more clearly, and that the pitch of a woman’s voice makes it easier to understand what has been said.
Of course, today there are exceptions, and various virtual assistant voice options are becoming available. I predict that over the coming years, development in virtual assistant voice technology will lead to major brands having their own, unique, marketable voices.
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