New study! 🎉 How visuals shape the way we perceive voice assistant gender
20 Oct 2025Most voice assistants still sound female – even when designed to be neutral? 🤔
In our new study, The Influence of Visual Context on the Perception of Voice Assistant Gender, we explored how people perceive Apple Siri’s gender-neutral voice Quinn. We found that listeners tended to rate Quinn as more female-sounding – especially when a female portrait was shown at the same time (see Figure 1a). This confirms that what we see 👀 can strongly influence what we hear 👂, even if it is unrelated to the task at hand.
Designing truly gender-neutral voice assistants isn’t just about the sound itself — our expectations and the visual context play a powerful role too.
We had the pleasure of presenting this work at P&P 2024 in Halle, Germany. Read the full paper in the proceedings (pp. 55-63). #openaccess 🔓