Why Siri is she?
Scientific studies have proved that people find a woman’s voice more pleasing and freindly than a man’s.Siri the new iPhone 4s app answers questions in a part-human, part-robot voice that’s deep, briskly efficient and distinctly female in the U.S. and four other countries atleast. In France and the UK, Siri is a man’s voice.
Siri’s gender have prompted some iPhone 4s users to flood blogs and online forums with sexually suggestive questions for Siri such as “What are you wearing?” to which Siri’s response is “Why do people keep asking me this?”
Research suggests this preference of liking a female voice over a male’s starts as early as the womb.A study was also conducted in which fetuses were found to react to the sound of their mother’s voice but not to other female voices. The fetuses showed no distinct reaction to their father’s voice, however.
This may explain why in GPS navigation systems the default voice is female. One notable exception has been Germany, where BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on its 5 Series cars in the late 1990s after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman!
