Transcript
Mastodon posts by @trenchworms@eldritch.cafe:
super revealing of the misogyny inherent to the space that “AI assistants” stopped being given feminine-coded names the moment tech chuds thought they were developing higher levels of autonomy
“i TELL Alexa what to do. i COLLABROATE with Chudbot. i will not reflect on this hierarchy at all.”
Shitty way to say it, but you’re right. I used to work on mobile industrial robots, the sorts of machines that deliver parts in factories, clean rooms, semiconductor fabs, etc. These are industrial machines and have about as much gender as an office printer. We sold them in countries all over the world. At some point we added an off the shelf text to speech library so that to robots could communicate with non-technical people and say things like, “Excuse me” or “I’m lost”. It supported a bunch of languages and could use a male or female voice.
People in different countries had shockingly strong opinions about what gender the voice should have. The US, Canada, France and UK customers wanted them to be female. Germany and the Spanish speaking countries wanted male. Korea and China wanted male IIRC, but Japan insisted on female.
I’m sure this says something about the culture in all of those places, but I have no idea what.
American take: computer voices should be female because the higher pitch is easier to understand in an environment with any significant background noise.
Middle-aged guy take: Computer voices should be medium pitched because we’ve lost too much of our high pitched hearing due to concerts and working in noisy environments.
Grumpy middle-aged guy take: Computers shouldn’t talk to me. If I want get information from one, I’ll use a terminal like Turing intended.
I mean I’ve seen Japanese porn too but women who aren’t pretending to have pixelated orgasms don’t speak that high pitched.
Did Alan Turing live to see a terminal, or did the limeys Conservative him to death before the first interactive UI?
I think the first full terminal was the hard copy terminal for the Wirlwind 1 in 1956. So he missed it by two years. Fucking hell.