“This is a continuation of Apple’s long-standing commitment to diversity and inclusion, and products and services that are designed to better reflect the diversity of the world we live in.” “We’re excited to introduce two new Siri voices for English speakers and the option for Siri users to select the voice they want when they set up their device,” a statement from Apple reads. But this change makes the choice the users’ for the first time. In some countries and languages Siri already defaults to a male voice. The two new voices also bring some much needed variety to the voices of Siri, offering more diversity in speech sound and pattern to a user picking a voice that speaks to them. This is a positive step forward as it allows people to choose the voice that they prefer without the defaults bias coming into play. I believe that this is the first of these assistants to make the choice completely agnostic with no default selection made. The beta version should be live now and available to program participants. This means that every person setting up Siri will choose a voice for themselves and it will no longer default to the voice assistant being female, a topic that has come up quite a bit with regards to bias in voice interfaces over the past few years. Apple is adding two new voices to Siri’s English offerings, and eliminating the default “female voice” selection in the latest beta version of iOS.
