Generally from those who have decided that their job is to find ways to be offended by everything. If Alexa and Siri had male voices by default, I have no doubt that the same people would be complaining that tech bros are erasing the historical contributions that women made as secretaries and assistants.

You know, I never understood why people trot this idea out so often. It's so irrational.

If people were rational, they would say "hmm, X doesn't offend me, but many people say that X offend them; perhaps they have a point."

Instead, only those who are incapable of understanding their own confirmation bias say "All these people say that X offends them; how silly."

I think this is a highly irrational take.

The better take would be: "Some people seem to be offended by everything; other people are not. What are the principal factors of a person that go into predicting 'will this person be offended by X'?"

I was pretty disappointed that all the major voice assistants have female voices and most of them have explicit female personas and names. I find it a little creepy to be honest.

At least Google didn't go for the whole personality crap. They could switch Google Assistant to this type of voice and it'd fit in. You can't switch Alexa to this type of voice while keeping that name.

I don't know what you're reading, but HN is generally highly skeptical of those too, perhaps overly so. This is especially true with your web framework example.

You hear 'genderless' voices every day, which is to say, voices which one couldn't place as being male or female with any reasonable accuracy.

You'd be surprised at who in your immediate vicinity has more or less a non gendered voice if you didn't have all the other 'clues' as to their gender.

In the production of synthetic voices, surely we've come across many which are de-facto genderless already.