These all sounded to me like people auditioning for a role in film and television or something.

[1] https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/

It really sounded like people from central casting. The fact that is was exactly that is hilarious to me.

Your point is well advised!

There were already AI products with exactly this behavior (perhaps sans multi-modality) prior to OpenAI's demo. Some of them were even open source. And these products will cater to the things we care about: local, niche, privacy-respecting, with bespoke domain expertise.

So if I'm asking it a question on a neutral tone it will answer in the same way.

I hope eventually they can pick up language, dialect and accent from youtube content or something like that, because voice casting will never scale to the thousands of variations they need to have to support a global audience. Instead of picking a voice from a handful of choices it should do a q&a where it learns your locale and intonation preferences and generates a tailored voice on the fly.

Still, I am impressed with the quality of the voices they have and with how well they manage dutch. It is just the case that there still is a lot of room for growth.

There is nothing intrinsically neutral about the British accent, it's more a matter of diction from the speaker. I would also not consider the OpenAI accents as neutral American, feels more like "Young Californian adult woman" accent to me.

The UK has more distinct accents than the US. However RP English, which was popular in an American form as “mid Atlantic” last century, is almost impossible for any English speaker to misconstrue thanks to its emphasis on clear diction. British actors have been proving that in the US for over a century. No one needs subtitles to understand Hugh Grant. Standard US accents frequently fail the merry, marry, Mary test and are worse overall.

Even us Americans know this. The classic, original, beloved voice of the NY subway was a British guy faking a “flat” American accent.

If you're interested in her voice

It's from 4 years ago so I assume the quality could be much better, but it still feels a lot less natural than to talk with a "gendered" voice.

I also don't really understand the problem of having only gendered voices. It's not YOUR voice, GPT-4 isn't speaking in your place, it's another entity that has its own voice.

Do you ask people to speak with a gender neutral voice? If not how is that different?

I don't know how I got myself into the position in this argument but where I'm coming from is a sexy female voice as the default for a voice assistant seems old-fashioned to me.

It feels like a lot of products are designed by white males and they represent their fantasies and desires. The customers are more diverse than the people designing the products and companies should be mindful of that.

The why question is easily answered if you see how many negative reactions their choice of voice caused. A gender-neutral voice would have just avoided annoying a certain percentage of the population, including me.

I'm happy if advertising stops hitting the sexy/cliched stereotypes.

Sometimes the Guardian goes a bit far but OpenAI could have avoided this kind of article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/1...

(Edit: I guess I was being slightly inflammatory with my first sentence. I think the default voice should be gender-neutral and then let the user choose what makes them happy. I don't think it was clever of OpenAI to use a sexy female as the default voice in their demos as evidenced by us having this discussion)

The goal of a tool is to be used by someone, and if the interface is the voice that the user can interact with it makes sense that it should ultimately be up to the user's preferences how the voice will sound like.

I see the fact that they're aiming for gender-neutral voice as yet another ludicrous attempt to advertise their advocation for inclusiveness which, while I'm in favor, I think has manifestations that go well past benefiting the original intention. Examples: Main over Master branch on git repositories, Latinx, removing "blind playthrough" on Twitch.tv because it indicates ableism, and so on.

I don't mind having some voice selections out of the box, but if they're gonna restrict my options and ability to change them to fit my preferences then I do mind. Our primal brain (lizard/monkey, or whatever tag you feel like assigning) will always perceive voice interaction as "talking to someone else", so why not just let the user choose who they talk to? It's a tool, for the user's needs. There's no need with appropriate ascribing of a gender to a tool, because it's not a human or anything living.

But I think the default voice and your first public demos could be gender-neutral these days.

ChatGPT, a system designed to deal with human language and answer in a way similar to a human, will surely be anthropomorphized, and many people will want it to have male or female voices.

Gender neutral should definitely exist as an option, it makes a lot of sense, but I don't see why it should be the only option.

They would have annoyed less people if the accents weren't so American and quirky. Google Maps has had a female voice since like forever and I don't remember any outrage.

For whatever historical reason, the majority of Indo-European languages assign genders to nouns, so apparently it does make some sense.

Also, I'm offended on behalf of all Cylons.

To be honest, this HN thread was the first time I saw someone complaining about male and female voices in ChatGPT.

>A gender-neutral voice would have just avoided annoying a certain percentage of the population, including me.

The voice actors and actresses hired by OpenAI use their natural voices for training, I don't understand how that could be annoying to anyone, is the problem that they didn't hire a trans person (I imagine they have a more neutral voice)?

It's the fifth place I've seen it since yesterday. And I haven't been looking. Even my mum sent me a Guardian article about it on Whatsapp.

Daily show: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/51ucQ4s7Crc

In my opinion, they should have hired a trans person, created a gender-neutral voice, and used that as the default. It would not have caused a backlash to the voices.

I'm assuming you're trans and you follow or know people who seem to really care about these issues. I think you might be deeply biased, I search for the ChatGPT voice on Google and no one really seems to care about it in a negative way, if there was an actual backlash I would be able to find it easily.

>In my opinion, they should have hired a trans person, created a gender-neutral voice, and used that as the default.

I think the vast majority of the population would find it more natural to have a female or male voice. I also believe that people should be hired for their skills, not their gender.

Couldn't the fact that most ChatGPT developers are white, cis-male, and affluent introduce bias that one needs to actively work against to ensure a more inclusive and representative technology? Given historical discrimination, we need to elevate underrepresented voices to even the playing field.

I think the problem lies with a small group of people online who always see malice first, if the AI has a female voice then it's because people think women are submissive, if the AI has a male voice then it would be the patriarchy, the AI can tell you where to go for example. Some people who want to complain will always find a way to complain, there is nothing wrong with having a female or male voice as the default one.

>most ChatGPT developers are white, cis-male

White and cis doesn't really surprise me, since most of the US is white and cis; Sam Altmam is gay, if this sort of thing actually matters. The smaller presence of women in STEM disciplines is noticeable; for some reason, all of my female friends seem to care far less about computers, probably some bias at portraiting hackers as men in the media or something (even though the vast majority of hackers are indeed men), it's like the chicken or egg dilemma.

Why not choose a gender-neutral voice if it makes a minority more comfortable? Does a gender-neutral voice cause harm to the rest of us?

Estimates for the percentage of transgender people is between 0.1% and 0.6% of the global population.

OpenAI offers 5 voices. I'd say it's perfectly statistically representative of the population.

Also the voice "Breeze" sounds gender-neutral to me.

Just, the default subservient, sexy female assistant doesn't help this technology's inclusivity.

How do you manage to be annoyed when they offer both male and female voices?

I think you're the problem here buddy.

The default sounds gender-neutral to me, or at least not very feminine, and it matches your tone, so it's "sexy" if you're being "sexy".

That said I think we all agree the demo was awful.

I basically spend more time talking to ChatGPT than humans these days when I'm not on holiday. I'm in no way opposed to it.

I don't know why, but I always end up going down the devil's advocate route without even realizing it. And then I find myself arguing positions that I don't even agree with. But it's interesting.

I don't know if you speak a language with genders, I assume you don't. A computer personality needs a gender in some languages in order to talk naturally about itself.

For example, if it needs to answer a question with "I'm not sure." In Romanian it would say "Nu-s sigur." for a male personality or "Nu-s sigură." for female. There is no other option.

> it’s 2024

You know a position is bad when it's justified by "it's current year".

The person in question is transsexual. You're saying that regular men and women aren't neutral but transsexuals are?

> Computers better not have genders imo

This doesn't make any sense. Gender is an intrinsic part of many languages which cannot be ripped out. It's impossible to talk in some languages without picking a way of speaking which is either masculine or feminine.

I'm not opposed to computers using emotion at all, mind you. But I don't like that arguably the AI company furthest ahead is choosing this gaudy hollywood approach to marketing.

I personally hated the female voice, it wasn’t pleasant to listen to. I found it quite grating, making the demo hard to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/51ucQ4s7Crc

"Dude"s liking this I'd say are not many.

The only video I watched was the first one and it was hard finishing it. I can't stand a person talking like that, imagine a computer tool. Hard pass in both cases.

I love how they have to go out of their way to explain that, rather than train a model on Scarlett Johansson's voice, they came about her voice honestly, by just finding someone who's natural voice sounded the most like Scarlett Johansson... as, clearly, no one is questioning that this voice was chosen to mimic Scarlett Johansson.

(Note that if you select that voice today, you might not actually be using it anymore. I noticed earlier today I was shunted off to Juniper, which I didn't like as much.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40413209

> 400 people did some unpaid work for us, only 5 of which eventually got paid, after 5 months of not knowing will they or won't they.

Fair enough, that's how things work for other voice acting jobs as well, I just doubt it usually takes almost half a year. I wonder how many of the shortlisted 14 have just given up somewhere along the way.

Just an obnoxious zoomer voice

I doubt the net result is support. Expanding creative community - yes. But support - not quite; established creators will likely suffer because of openai, most of them already having a harder time.