This reporter suspects there’s quite the market for name-brand voices in the auto-attendant market -- Mel Gibson as William Wallace urging you to select one, two or three; Humphrey Bogart on a travel site would be particularly notable.
So how do the companies actually decide what voice to use? And why do they always seem to be female?
ABC News recently took a look at how Siri picked its voice. Siri isn’t an auto attendant, but the same considerations are used across all areas of voice recognition systems. And what ABC decided was that people like female voices.
And if you’ve noticed, Americans particularly fall for Britishy-sounding women. Receptionists at large financial firms and on their auto attendants tend to sport misty Celtic, Scot or lilting, plummy English accents -- when this reporter moved back to America in the ’90s to work for an Internet startup, his New Zealander wife was asked if she would please record the company’s auto attendant voices. The ultimate would probably be a Lady Diana-voiced auto attendant.
Don’t hear too many fair dinkum Aussie voices on auto attendants.
Not that the female voice is preferred everywhere. ABC noted that when BMW put female voices on their cars in Germany, they had to switch to male voices due to user complaints. Something about taking directions from women. Or maybe the voice projected from the back seat.
Still, “most synthetic computerized voices -- at least in the United States -- are female,” ABC said. Clifford Nass of Stanford University, an expert on how humans relate to machines, explained to ABC that “it's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than it is a male voice.”
“The traditional approach to IVR platforms has been to use a female voice,” TMC’s (News - Alert) Jaclyn Allard wrote last year, adding that while Phil Shinn, speech application developer and designer of voice user interface at the IVR Design Group, suggested that the decision to implement a female voice “may not always be the best” choice, it does seem to be the done thing -- “more than 75 percent of the almost 700 IVR systems in the GetHuman customer service database rely on the female voice.”
The reliance on female voices might be just industry superstition. Allard reported an Adweek/Harris poll which found that “19 percent of Americans to identify the female voice as more persuasive and inviting... 18 percent believed the same thing about the male voice. The majority, 64 percent, indicated that it did not make a difference whether the voice used in IVR messaging or an auto attendant system was a male or female.”
It goes back to babies in the womb and all that; we won’t bore you with the details, but Tim Bajarin of Apple (News - Alert)-watchers Creative Strategies told ABC he thinks it has to do with Apple wanting to be liked, and, well, more people like hearing their machines talk like women.
This appears to be an American thing -- Siri uses male voices in France and Great Britain. But hey -- you can’t sing a love duet with technology without a male voice.
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Rich Steeves