To develop voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, companies spend years investigating what sounds like a human voice and what doesn't. But what we've ended up with is just one possibility of the kinds of voices that we could be interacting with. In this episode, we talked to sound engineer Frederik Juutilainen, and Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Stina Hasse Jørgensen, about their participation in [multi'vocal], an experimental research project that created an alternative voice assistant by asking people at a rock festival in Denmark to speak into a portable recording box. We talk about voice assistants' inability to stutter, lisp and code switch, and whether a voice can express multiple personalities, genders and ages.
The Good Robot