It sounds feminine to me. I predict that the truth is in the ears of the beholder, and subconscious bias will cause people to sense a more masculine or feminine voice.
I agree, perception probably plays a lot into this. It seemed mostly feminine to me but wavered a lot between what I perceive feminine and masculine voices are. This doesn't seem like the answer but I agree with whoever created this in that it would be nice to have non-gendered computer voices. My reasoning is just that I don't want to give machines a fake gender - it's something that's always bothered me. That thing is not a him nor a her.
It sounds a little bit like the voice of a moppet-type character from League of Legends that just huffed helium.
Because it is so stylized you don't have the problem of a
"perfect english gentleman" who pauses unnaturally, sometimes makes vowels like T-Pain, etc. that you have with more realistic voices.
It definitely comes across as female to me, but it is cartoony enough that it not so culturally coded as female -- so there is less of a sense of "female servicing" as there
is with most voice assistants.
Although these are gimmicky the sort of route of approaching the problem from what would a machine or non-human AI voice sound like would actually get you the goal of a Genderless Voice.
As it stands Q isn't genderless it's just gender non-conforming, which is a great alternative but I'd like to see some work into an actual "AI" voice rather than these voice assistants that try to imitate a human on the gender spectrum.
"Technology companies often choose to gender technology believing it will make people more comfortable adopting it.
Unfortunately this reinforces a binary perception of gender, and perpetuates stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress.
As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.
Q is an example of what we hope the future holds; a future of ideas, inclusion, positions and diverse representation in technology."
> stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress
What stereotypes would this help to alleviate?
> the technology we create should follow.
Why it's a service that communications via artificial audio. Why is it important that you can't have a male or a female voice? People still exist, the voices in question don't have a physical appearance.
Though I don't feel strongly either way, my guess is that, since people usually leave software on defaults and female voices are typically chosen for voice assistants, the stereotype might be of women being servants.
That seems to me like a far reaching problem to solve. I don't believe anyone actually thinks like that, I think this hypothetical issue exists in the minds of people trying to solve it.
It's one thing to subscribe to gender roles traditional to your culture, but a totally different thing to base your attitude towards women on the perceived gender of a virtual assistant on your phone.
You can kind of make a logical link if you try, but I don't believe that's how it plays out in reality. It'll possibly be more relevant if/when these virtual assistants become indistinguishable from humans and perhaps have a physical form.
> but a totally different thing to base your attitude towards women on the perceived gender of a virtual assistant on your phone.
Well, if you say "base", then yeah that's very unlikely. However, their attitude doesn't need to be based on that, it could simply be supported by it, even a little bit.
If all your life you've seen women in a "serving" sort of role, like seeing only female nurses serving your medicine, female waitresses serving your food, female caretakers serving your kids and elders, female maids serving your house needs, and even your female-sounding phone serving your electronic needs, then in aggregate and in time that sets an idea, even a subconscious one, that contributes to your understanding of how the world works.
I don't see this genderless voice as being the solution to a problem. I see it as them just trying to do their small part in a change they want to see.
I'd say there's a big difference between someone consciously thinking in a certain way, and building associations, many of which they don't notice. In fact, it's been one of the principal aims of psychology, sociology and economics to uncover how people act on such opinions without knowing they actually hold them.
"Female voices do however appear to have an advantage in that they can portray a greater range of urgencies because of their usually higher pitch and pitch range. An experiment is reported showing that knowledge about the sex of a speaker has no effect on judgements of perceived urgency, with acoustic variables accounting for such differences."
If technology is needed to create this kind of voice -- IE it's not really natural, and as others have suggested it creates an uncanny valley of voice that confuses people, wouldn't that actually perpetuate the idea that there is a gender binary?
(I don't have a dog in this fight, I just don't see that this accomplishes what you want it to)
Yes. You find contradictions all through this kind of belief system if you analyse it logically, because it's driven first and foremost by how people feel (or how people think others might feel).
The analysis of the social construction of gender is not derived from "feelings."
This technology is actually quite inconsistent with gender studies, which is why I find it quite baffling. Gender as an identity would imply that a female could have a deep gravelly voice and that a man could also have a higher pitched softer voice, as ones gender identity need not be dictated by their born sex or physical attributes.
This is quite fundamental to gender studies, making this tech not just useless, but completely counter intuitive to that project.
And silly, too. Regardless of what is going on inside a person's head (which we can choose to respect, absolutely), biologically there is definitely just two genders. You can identify however you like, modify if you wish, but in the end your body will be one or the other, right along with your voice.
Gender is not a biological concept, period; that's sex. Your body is also distinctly not "one or the other", given that a large portion of the world is born with one of several intersex conditions.
> a large portion of the world is born with one of several intersex conditions
No, a very very small portion. Gender doesn't vary independently from sex, you'd be hard pressed to find a stronger correlation. It's misleading to consider them as totally separate things.
One can espouse such opinions freely and openly but alas disagreeing in any sort of way would often be unwise from a career and public profile perspective.
> As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.
People who neither identify as male nor female AND want to listen to a gender-neutral voice seems like a very niche market.
it is an interesting idea. technology of course has no gender, and any synthesized speech can only express an arbitrary simulation of gender, so making this explicit reveals the underlying reality that all technological simulations of gender are by definition constructed. a piece of art that demonstrates the construction of gender probably will not catch on well as a product though.
I instantly recognized the voice as M2F, before it even confirmed that by the description of how it was created. If I had a device with this voice, I would feel a strong urge to reenact the final printer scene from the movie Office Space.
Companies want their voice-enabled products to be purchased. Revulsion doesn't help.
Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe the people who do care about it can go about creating solutions to their real or perceived problem(s), and maybe the can be okay.
It seems possible, from my perspective, there is enough motivation to go around to work on multiple issues at once.
While climate change, over-fishing, land degradation, certainly could do with more attention, gender issues represent a fairly immediate threat for some people in some places at some times.
Complaints about priorities are a fallacy more often than not, especially since we're talking about different actors - it's not like the people who did this would have been working on climate change otherwise.
But if we were playing the priority game, I'd say that the gender issues that represent immediate threats are stuff like domestic violence and sexual assault. It's reasonable to argue that reducing overall gender bias affects those, but it's a very subtle and long-term effect - and likely beyond the AGW event horizon. It's not going to do anything about the immediate threat.
I find synthetic voices, vocaloid and virtual actors (like “virtual” youtubers) to be interesting in that they when replacing something usually performed by a human, they often do it in way lower quality due to technical limitations.
So it theory here should be a lower appeal to it, but on the other hand there’s a ton of side effects and “disruptive” uses that make the technology useful for a population different from what was intended.
From the top of my head this “neutral” voice could be nice for phone guidance or voice translation, where the awkwardness of the voice could be an advantage. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a bumber of people came forward to declare this the thing they’ve been waiting for years.
The page asserts that audio content to many listeners is firstly "defined" (though perhaps "subconsciously emotionally engaged with to some extent" would be more accurate) by perceived gender, before semantics. The notion is that by adding a genderless/neutral voice, this would be removed. Of course, you then need to discard genders in names as well, hence 'Q'. It's pretty forward thinking... I don't doubt assistant tech may go this way. However, wouldn't "dehumanization by association" for non gender identifying individuals be a risk if that popularizes? A nice thought-provoking art project, if nothing else.
> A computer assistant doesn't have a gender so why should it represent itself as male or female
A human has to be in the recording booth to create the vocal library. Also you can change the Siri voice to not only be Male, but also have a different accent.
> A human has to be in the recording booth to create the vocal library.
do they? i mean, we're not great at synthesizing natural-sounding voices yet, but that's a technical challenge – not something inherent to the problem.
What would make it "natural-sounding", though? What if that happens to include gender stereotypes?
I don't think it's possible to assert that it's purely a technical challenge before we understand the goal clearly, beyond "I'll know it when I hear it".
This view of the future seems very bland and uninteresting.
I thought the idea is to make gender a flexible thing, for example you can experiment with being a female or whatever gender profile, based on whatever you feel comfortable with.
Not to reduce the worlds gender representations (in business, culture, etc) into a homogeneous middle ground? Expanding what's possible in terms of personal expression rather than (further) restricting it. So I'm very confused why this exists other than as an interesting technical project?
I had the same experience. I hope this isn't going to spin off more academic work about why our brains are hard-wired to be sexist by continually and automatically trying to perceive the gender of speaker based on their speech.
Interesting concept, but it sounds slightly female to me.
I wonder what difference is there between male and female voices besides pitch (excluding cultural differences in way of speaking)? If some are exclusively binary, using or not using it will obligatorily lead to one or the other, and if so, a totally "gender" neutral voice becomes impossible.
(I used gender enclosed in quotes because I'm only talking about the general biological differences between male and female voices, not elements such as way of speaking, choice of words, etc)
Maybe one approach could be mix aspects from both male and female voice.
I've heard it's not just the average pitch that varies; female voices also tend have a wider range of pitch. In other words most men speak in more of a monotone than most women. Whether this is biological or cultural, I don't know.
I've given input on political issues as well as gender issues under multiple identities and personas to gain consensus
Almost no progress on consensus regarding political issues but on some sex and gender issues the male persona was unqualified to "mansplain" or had to much privilege to contribute or complain, where the same information was agreed upon and deemed helpful coming from the non-male persona - assumed to be female
This is more about the decision path people make to discredit a someone. When confronted with information that deviates from your script, people typically look for faults in the messenger instead of the actual information. You look for words that a different party would use exclusively to pigeonhole the messenger as the other, you look for other biases.
I felt that even if an A.I. was created to try to aggregate perspectives and offer its observations, people would try to disagree with it based on who created it. A valid criticism, but what would be left with to offer potentially unifying perspectives.
I like this and I imagine how it can be trained to create a voice that you agree with, but that nobody else would hear.
..... based on your cookies.
Then everybody gets to hear a different voice and mostly the same information - perhaps slightly different words as to not undermine the illusion.
If we could figure out how to make a genderless voice, then it would be intolerant. This is not a gender neutral voice. It sounds like it's cycling between female-type and male-type voices with a very strong bias towards female-type.
I applaud the effort, but it falls very short. The voice itself is intolerant because it's almost a parody.
this is really cool. my personal reaction was to feel it was a little odd and off, but as I moved the Hz meter up and down it went from "oh a womans voice" to "oh a mans voice" pretty clearly. that is just plain interesting to know, I'd never seen how clearly quantifiable and single-axis that distinction can be. I bet if i spent a few weeks or so using a device in those Hz ranges i'd get used to it.
I'm not sure I see the problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female, and I certainly wouldn't buy this. It just sounds wrong, and I can't quite say why. I guess after all the work tech companies have put into trying to sound like a person, this deliberately doesn't.
Also, it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower. Even when I use the little drag thingy to pitch it as low as it will go, it still sounds female. I think most of us know pitch alone doesn't define voice, and that's clear from this.
Concentrate harder; it also sounds like a high pitched male.
Basically, for me, I flip flop between two genders. For me, there is no such thing as "genderless" voice, just "gender meta-stable" at best.
Another thing to consider is that adult female voices sound like boy's voices. In animation, boy characters are often acted by women (who aren't doing anything to change their voices).
So "gender neutral" easily has the interpretation of "between boy and man".
I think it sounds feminine in a couple senses, but male in others:
* The speaker speaks less from the chest and more from the throat
* In terms of enunciation, females tend to speak more clearly on sounds such as "t"s, which can be observed here.
* The voice sounds a little more male in that the ends of many words trend lower in pitch, but more female in that they "bottom out" very early in the descent and dip heavily into vocal fry.
* There is less range of tone, which is more characteristically male.
All this aside, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually multiple people. And I suppose the fact that we all disagree is evidence that they're doing something right. But I think most of us can agree it still sounds really wrong in some way.
It does, but that is deceptive. Voice is determined by the pitch of the vocal tract and the spectral filtering caused by its shape: the "formant". Both can be manipulated digitally to create different voices.
I do perceive that there are abrupt transition in the voice as you move the so-called frequency slider; that could be due to abrupt changes in some parameters (like table lookup from a small table keyed to the frequency parameter or something).
To be fair, most cartoon boy characters don't really sound like real boys. If you listen to their voice without looking at the character, it becomes obvious that it's a woman.
They are close enough that you don't have to deal with the nightmare that is child talent.
You're quite right, but that at least sounds like a person. It's this unnatural almost-human type thing I can't stand. Also, I'm not signing up for alexa with a cartoon boy's voice any time soon.
>Also, it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower.
That’s exactly what I hear. I’m not annoyed there is a market for such frivolous “woke” things, but I am annoyed it seems to be a mediocre attempt at it, it’s entirely female to me.
> There is no problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female; what's the problem with some other voice assistant sounding genderless?
This is literally the whole problem. It's less that it's genderless in a robotic sense and more that it's a hybrid manipulation of actual voices. It just sounds wrong.
> Maybe you're used to all people sounding male or female, so sounding like neither seems unfamiliar.
Maybe so. We try to make our robots imitate humans, so of course they sound male or female. From what the website said, it might also be flipping between. But even if I am just used to it, so what? That's how I'd prefer my voice assistant to sound, if I ever got one. It's nobody's place to tell me what I should prefer, or say I need to get some creepy-sounding thing just to be woke.
Another vote for the voice sounding like a deep voiced Female.
Also, if their criteria for recording was what people "identify" as that's not going to help much.
They would need people who are biologically both, hermaphrodites, or neither, neuters (i.e. hormonally castrato). And given that humans are by default biologically female (i.e. without hormones a human becomes female) I'm not surprised the voice sounds female.
Also, their "future" of people not identifying as male or female (I assume they mean that most people would be like that, not a minority) is not a future I desire.
Having males and females makes life far more enjoyable (for most).
The minority where that doesn't work for them shouldn't have a problem with the fact that others are. Anymore than someone atheist should have an issue with someone religious.
People (or voices) don't have to be similar to you in order for you to interact with them.
I would humbly suggest that the bevy of reactions to this innovation that amount to 'eww ugh this creeps me out' is evidence of precisely the cisheteronormative bias that this voice was designed to mitigate. I invite you to introspect about your (dis)comfort around folks who are gender-nonconforming.
263 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=186
That's because it's the voice used to announce the titles of the episodes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KV84lt9Kho
* Soundwave G1 voice compilation part I - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOu3hYXE_tM
It sounds a little bit like the voice of a moppet-type character from League of Legends that just huffed helium. Because it is so stylized you don't have the problem of a "perfect english gentleman" who pauses unnaturally, sometimes makes vowels like T-Pain, etc. that you have with more realistic voices.
It definitely comes across as female to me, but it is cartoony enough that it not so culturally coded as female -- so there is less of a sense of "female servicing" as there is with most voice assistants.
As it stands Q isn't genderless it's just gender non-conforming, which is a great alternative but I'd like to see some work into an actual "AI" voice rather than these voice assistants that try to imitate a human on the gender spectrum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRq7Muf6CKg
Please recognise that agender people are both human and genderless.
Unfortunately this reinforces a binary perception of gender, and perpetuates stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress.
As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.
Q is an example of what we hope the future holds; a future of ideas, inclusion, positions and diverse representation in technology."
What stereotypes would this help to alleviate?
> the technology we create should follow.
Why it's a service that communications via artificial audio. Why is it important that you can't have a male or a female voice? People still exist, the voices in question don't have a physical appearance.
Though I don't feel strongly either way, my guess is that, since people usually leave software on defaults and female voices are typically chosen for voice assistants, the stereotype might be of women being servants.
You'd be surprised. The world is vast and gender roles are traditional in many cultures.
You can kind of make a logical link if you try, but I don't believe that's how it plays out in reality. It'll possibly be more relevant if/when these virtual assistants become indistinguishable from humans and perhaps have a physical form.
Well, if you say "base", then yeah that's very unlikely. However, their attitude doesn't need to be based on that, it could simply be supported by it, even a little bit.
If all your life you've seen women in a "serving" sort of role, like seeing only female nurses serving your medicine, female waitresses serving your food, female caretakers serving your kids and elders, female maids serving your house needs, and even your female-sounding phone serving your electronic needs, then in aggregate and in time that sets an idea, even a subconscious one, that contributes to your understanding of how the world works.
I don't see this genderless voice as being the solution to a problem. I see it as them just trying to do their small part in a change they want to see.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14965452
(I don't have a dog in this fight, I just don't see that this accomplishes what you want it to)
This technology is actually quite inconsistent with gender studies, which is why I find it quite baffling. Gender as an identity would imply that a female could have a deep gravelly voice and that a man could also have a higher pitched softer voice, as ones gender identity need not be dictated by their born sex or physical attributes.
This is quite fundamental to gender studies, making this tech not just useless, but completely counter intuitive to that project.
And silly, too. Regardless of what is going on inside a person's head (which we can choose to respect, absolutely), biologically there is definitely just two genders. You can identify however you like, modify if you wish, but in the end your body will be one or the other, right along with your voice.
Redefining gender is an uphill battle. I won't wish you good luck in doing that, I'd prefer coming up with a new term for this goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
No, a very very small portion. Gender doesn't vary independently from sex, you'd be hard pressed to find a stronger correlation. It's misleading to consider them as totally separate things.
What sort of "intersex conditions" are large portions of the world born with? What do you mean by "large portion?" Like 50%? 30%?
Happy to follow a link if you don't want to type it out and would rather paste a URL
People who neither identify as male nor female AND want to listen to a gender-neutral voice seems like a very niche market.
Companies want their voice-enabled products to be purchased. Revulsion doesn't help.
It seems possible, from my perspective, there is enough motivation to go around to work on multiple issues at once.
While climate change, over-fishing, land degradation, certainly could do with more attention, gender issues represent a fairly immediate threat for some people in some places at some times.
But if we were playing the priority game, I'd say that the gender issues that represent immediate threats are stuff like domestic violence and sexual assault. It's reasonable to argue that reducing overall gender bias affects those, but it's a very subtle and long-term effect - and likely beyond the AGW event horizon. It's not going to do anything about the immediate threat.
I find synthetic voices, vocaloid and virtual actors (like “virtual” youtubers) to be interesting in that they when replacing something usually performed by a human, they often do it in way lower quality due to technical limitations.
So it theory here should be a lower appeal to it, but on the other hand there’s a ton of side effects and “disruptive” uses that make the technology useful for a population different from what was intended.
From the top of my head this “neutral” voice could be nice for phone guidance or voice translation, where the awkwardness of the voice could be an advantage. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a bumber of people came forward to declare this the thing they’ve been waiting for years.
I find something offputting that so many agents pick a female voice (e.g. Alexa, Siri)
A human has to be in the recording booth to create the vocal library. Also you can change the Siri voice to not only be Male, but also have a different accent.
do they? i mean, we're not great at synthesizing natural-sounding voices yet, but that's a technical challenge – not something inherent to the problem.
I don't think it's possible to assert that it's purely a technical challenge before we understand the goal clearly, beyond "I'll know it when I hear it".
Its research based, not merely "sexism":
https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/tech/innovation/female-comput...
One could argue that a computer assistant should have a human-like voice and an overwhelming majority of humans have distinctly male or female voices.
https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl
Confident and helpful -- shouldn't that be the aim? Doesn't that sound different for men and women? And across different nationalities?
Q sounds unsure of itself to me... and just weird. I wouldn't prefer this voice to Siri or just about any of the old MacOS voices.
* Mac OS X TTS (Text-To-Speech) Voices - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4hqUxb9MmY
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
I thought the idea is to make gender a flexible thing, for example you can experiment with being a female or whatever gender profile, based on whatever you feel comfortable with.
Not to reduce the worlds gender representations (in business, culture, etc) into a homogeneous middle ground? Expanding what's possible in terms of personal expression rather than (further) restricting it. So I'm very confused why this exists other than as an interesting technical project?
I wonder what difference is there between male and female voices besides pitch (excluding cultural differences in way of speaking)? If some are exclusively binary, using or not using it will obligatorily lead to one or the other, and if so, a totally "gender" neutral voice becomes impossible.
(I used gender enclosed in quotes because I'm only talking about the general biological differences between male and female voices, not elements such as way of speaking, choice of words, etc)
Maybe one approach could be mix aspects from both male and female voice.
I've given input on political issues as well as gender issues under multiple identities and personas to gain consensus
Almost no progress on consensus regarding political issues but on some sex and gender issues the male persona was unqualified to "mansplain" or had to much privilege to contribute or complain, where the same information was agreed upon and deemed helpful coming from the non-male persona - assumed to be female
This is more about the decision path people make to discredit a someone. When confronted with information that deviates from your script, people typically look for faults in the messenger instead of the actual information. You look for words that a different party would use exclusively to pigeonhole the messenger as the other, you look for other biases.
I felt that even if an A.I. was created to try to aggregate perspectives and offer its observations, people would try to disagree with it based on who created it. A valid criticism, but what would be left with to offer potentially unifying perspectives.
I like this and I imagine how it can be trained to create a voice that you agree with, but that nobody else would hear.
..... based on your cookies.
Then everybody gets to hear a different voice and mostly the same information - perhaps slightly different words as to not undermine the illusion.
I applaud the effort, but it falls very short. The voice itself is intolerant because it's almost a parody.
Also, it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower. Even when I use the little drag thingy to pitch it as low as it will go, it still sounds female. I think most of us know pitch alone doesn't define voice, and that's clear from this.
Concentrate harder; it also sounds like a high pitched male.
Basically, for me, I flip flop between two genders. For me, there is no such thing as "genderless" voice, just "gender meta-stable" at best.
Another thing to consider is that adult female voices sound like boy's voices. In animation, boy characters are often acted by women (who aren't doing anything to change their voices).
So "gender neutral" easily has the interpretation of "between boy and man".
I think it sounds feminine in a couple senses, but male in others:
* The speaker speaks less from the chest and more from the throat
* In terms of enunciation, females tend to speak more clearly on sounds such as "t"s, which can be observed here.
* The voice sounds a little more male in that the ends of many words trend lower in pitch, but more female in that they "bottom out" very early in the descent and dip heavily into vocal fry.
* There is less range of tone, which is more characteristically male.
All this aside, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually multiple people. And I suppose the fact that we all disagree is evidence that they're doing something right. But I think most of us can agree it still sounds really wrong in some way.
I do perceive that there are abrupt transition in the voice as you move the so-called frequency slider; that could be due to abrupt changes in some parameters (like table lookup from a small table keyed to the frequency parameter or something).
They are close enough that you don't have to deal with the nightmare that is child talent.
That’s exactly what I hear. I’m not annoyed there is a market for such frivolous “woke” things, but I am annoyed it seems to be a mediocre attempt at it, it’s entirely female to me.
> It just sounds wrong, and I can't quite say why.
Maybe you're used to all people sounding male or female, so sounding like neither seems unfamiliar.
This is literally the whole problem. It's less that it's genderless in a robotic sense and more that it's a hybrid manipulation of actual voices. It just sounds wrong.
> Maybe you're used to all people sounding male or female, so sounding like neither seems unfamiliar.
Maybe so. We try to make our robots imitate humans, so of course they sound male or female. From what the website said, it might also be flipping between. But even if I am just used to it, so what? That's how I'd prefer my voice assistant to sound, if I ever got one. It's nobody's place to tell me what I should prefer, or say I need to get some creepy-sounding thing just to be woke.
Also, if their criteria for recording was what people "identify" as that's not going to help much.
They would need people who are biologically both, hermaphrodites, or neither, neuters (i.e. hormonally castrato). And given that humans are by default biologically female (i.e. without hormones a human becomes female) I'm not surprised the voice sounds female.
Also, their "future" of people not identifying as male or female (I assume they mean that most people would be like that, not a minority) is not a future I desire.
Having males and females makes life far more enjoyable (for most).
The minority where that doesn't work for them shouldn't have a problem with the fact that others are. Anymore than someone atheist should have an issue with someone religious.
People (or voices) don't have to be similar to you in order for you to interact with them.
hypothesis confirmed