Wesley Hilliard
Apple has introduced two new English voice options for Siri and will no longer default to a female voice at setup.
Siri is Apple's smart voice assistant that uses machine learning to address user queries. Apple has updated Siri over the years with more language and voice options, but Wednesday's update addresses the bias towards using women as assistants.
According to TechCrunch, Apple is adding two new voice options to Siri and asking users to choose their preferred voice at setup. The new approach eliminates the inherent bias of having a female voice by default and instead asks users to choose.
Previously, users would need to navigate to Siri settings to change the voice. They would be presented with a list of accents and choose between "male" and "female" varieties. Now, users will be presented with "voice 1" or "voice 2" rather than gendered labels. The American Voice 4 is the Siri voice we've all become accustomed to.
"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," said Apple in a statement to TechCrunch. "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."
Siri uses voice actors and Neural Text To Speech (Neural TTS) to produce a voice that sounds natural. Since Neural TTS was introduced in iOS 13, it has become available in 38 voices across 21 languages. The update will also bring Neural TTS to Siri voices in Ireland, Russia, and Italy.
The two new voices are available in Apple's latest iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5 betas. The public release of the operating system updates is expected to release in the coming weeks.
Stay on top of all Apple news right from your HomePod. Say, "Hey, Siri, play AppleInsider," and you'll get latest AppleInsider Podcast. Or ask your HomePod mini for "AppleInsider Daily" instead and you'll hear a fast update direct from our news team. And, if you're interested in Apple-centric home automation, say "Hey, Siri, play HomeKit Insider," and you'll be listening to our newest specialized podcast in moments.
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15 Comments
Good move Apple.
I’ve always been pouring hot water when it comes to Siri, but just recently, I found myself in serious need of voice-controlled assistant service for my new job.. so,trying Siri in many new ways.. and so my disappointment grows. Siri is terrible in my opinion. Looking backward to Apple keynotes, Siri is able to interact usefuly only in few areas Apple prescripted and showed off.
What is Siri good at, is making various pardons when I’m annoyed by it’s primitivity.
Agreed. It makes you wonder exactly what John Giannandrea and co. have been doing for the last 3 years…and whether we, as consumers, will ever actually get to reap the benefits.
They keep tinkering with the voices and adding tiny inconsequential features to Siri that only work when you word the request exactly as is shown in marketing, and which don't make a material difference in the overall quality of Siri. As far as dictation goes, the recognition of the words is generally pretty good, though more context sensitivity (or understanding of the sentence) around words which have similar sound but different spellings or are different words entirely would be, well, something that at least reaches the standard Alexa is at. Because right now when dictating, Siri frequently mishears and the resulting sentence makes no sense. I might say "its foggy here tonight" and Siri will hear "it's doggy here tonight" which is very unlikely.
That is of course aside from Siri's "intelligence" which is comparable to that of a brick. It would be better to remove Siri's "intelligence" entirely, and have hard-coded a list of things it can do, and a list of these somewhere with the specific way to say them. Because if you don't word the request exactly right it just doesn't understand or does something completely wrong. Mac OS 9's speakable items was more reliable and predictable than Siri - this is one of the rare times I say I bet it wouldn't be the same if Jobs was alive.
Another example, I regularly ask Siri to call "dad". At least 1/3 of the time it asks if I meant Dan amongst a couple of others, who I haven't phoned for about 5 years. My dad is missing from the list entirely. What are the lauded neural engines being used for if Siri can't even learn that I call "dad" more often than the others, despite repeatedly choosing something other than what it suggests? Great, photos are 1% less grainy through AI but yet Siri is still 50% wrong.
I don't ask anything special out of Siri -- play that album or song or podcast, what's the weather, how far to x, send a message to x, remind me to do x, Add [event] to my [type] calendar, that sort of thing -- and it does it all just fine, with no issues. I do find that certain tricky things -- the sort of thing no other vocal assistant can do either -- requires me to either enunciate more or spell out a particular term, but once I figure out the wording that works, it continues to work.
As for Elijahg, have you tried establishing your relationship with your father in Contacts? I did that with my sister and brother (my father is no longer living) and instantly Siri understood "call my sister" et al. While the default for that relationship would be "father," you can give him a custom label in the "related name" field to "Dad," and then it should work to say "call Dad" -- though if you have several Dans in your directory, I would be sure to pronounce that last D in "Dad." You might also try giving him the nickname of "Dad," that might improve your results as well.