If you have a smartphone, you also have your very own digital personal assistant. Theres the iPhones Siri (now added to Apple TV), of course, but dont forget Cortana on the Windows Phone or the S Voice on the Samsung Galaxy. All of these virtual voices have one thing in common: They all sound female.倘若你有一部智能手机，那你一定也不会有自己的私人专属数码助手。苹果手机上装有Siri语音助手（现今苹果电视上也装有此功能），当然，类似于的语音功能软件还有微软公司手机上的“Cortana”（微软公司小娜）以及三星“盖乐世”系列手机上的S Voice语音助手功能。
但所有的这些虚拟世界语音功能都有一个联合的特点：皆为女性发音。This, as you mightve guessed, is no coincidence. Writing for Wired this week, Jessi Hempel explores some of the social-science research on the way people perceive male voices versus female voices. Take, for example, research conducted by Karl MacDorman, an Indiana University professor who studies human-computer interaction:你有可能早已猜中到，这些凑巧并非无意间。杰西·亨普尔本周在美国《连线》杂志公开发表了一篇文章，文章写道他对一些社会科学方面的研究展开了调研，比如人们对男性和女性声音的感官方式差异。
荐个例子，印第安纳大学的一位主要研究嵌入式的教授卡尔·麦克道曼曾多次展开过这样一个研究：He and fellow researchers played clips of male and female voices to people of both genders, then asked them to identify which they preferred. The researchers also measured the way participants actually responded to the voices. In a 2011 paper, they reported that both women and men said female voices came across as warmer. In practice, women even showed a subconscious preference for responding to females; men remained subconsciously neutral. “Men will say they prefer female speech, and women really do prefer it,” MacDorman says.他和和其他研究人员给参予男女两性声音测试的志愿者分别播出了男性声音和女性声音的片段，然后让这些志愿者听得完了之后确认并投票决定所讨厌的声音。与此同时，研究人员还对志愿者实对声音的对系统展开了测量。他们曾多次在 2011 年的一篇文章中认为，女性和男性志愿者都指出女性的声音听得一起较为寒冷人心。
实验证明，女性志愿者对女性的声音展现出出有了一种潜意识上的爱好，而男性志愿者则仍潜意识地保持中立。卡尔·麦克道曼教授回应：“男性志愿者总是说道他们讨厌女性的声音，但女性志愿者才是真心实意地讨厌女性的声音。
Then again, you cant entirely discount the fact that the Silicon Valley tech-bros who are designing many of these virtual assistants may be falling back on the “stereotype of a compliant sidekick,” Hempel concedes. But then again, it will be interesting to watch how these voices evolve alongside the technology. After all, for their app, Dominos went with an affable-sounding dude-voice, which they dubbed Dom.当然，杰西·亨普尔在文中还提及：我们无法几乎坚称这样一个事实，即许多来自硅谷的虚拟世界助手设计师们有可能正在陷于“一个相容的助手”这样一个刻板印象上。不过，需要亲眼语音技术如何预示科技大大演进变革，也是件十分有意思的事。却是，多米诺(Domino)就在他们的 App 中用于了一名变暖男的声音，他们将它命名为 Dom。
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