According to a recent YouGov study involving 1,000 British smart home owners, female smart home owners are more likely to report that their device doesn't understand their commands. YouGov found that "two-thirds of female owners (67%) say their device doesn't respond at least "sometimes" to a voice command, compared to a small majority of male owners who say the same (54%)." "In contrast, 46% of men say their device fails 'rarely' or 'never', but only 32% of women." The researchers also found that women tended to speak more politely to their intelligent interlocutors, with 45% saying "always" or "often" saying "please" and "thank you," versus just 30% of male owners. ".
AI Bias
This discrepancy between male and female users could be the result of bias when training AI assistants like Alexa or Siri; If programmers train the AI to respond primarily to male voices, it may be difficult to recognize female voices in the future. However, not everyone believes that to be the case. The Evening Standard cites, in its review of the study, a blog post written by Delip Rao, founder and CEO of R7 Speech Sciences, who estimates that the gap is due to technological problems rather than the fact that it is not the same. To sexist prejudices. < p class="bordeaux-image-check">
Google Home (Image credit: Google) Explains that female voices have more variations in pitch than male voices, which can make it difficult for smart speakers to distinguish your commands. Rao argues that this problem could be solved by training voice assistants to distinguish when a male or female voice is being expressed; but, as he points out, this poses its own set of problems because it doesn't consider non-binary or transgender users, which could be fooled by the voice assistant. Perhaps the easiest way to combat this gap is for developers to "build models that learn directly from raw shapes" and provide their AI assistants with more varied examples of voices. ViaThe Evening Standard