Women, amirite?

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I’ve seen that making the rounds. Wonderful! :heart:

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In the fascinating study, it was also discovered that parents with more than one son lost their cognitive abilities faster than those who had only daughters.

While society worries about how difficult it will be to raise a girl child, science tells an entirely different story. People tend to believe that daughters are more difficult to deal with and families with multiple girl children are often pitied on. A new study challenged these patriarchal beliefs and stated that parenting sons might pose a bigger challenge for parents later in their lives. According to a study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, experts have found that having sons may speed up the cognitive decline in parents.

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I would agree with these findings, based on personal and anecdotal experience.

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This touches on a few adjacent issues that I didn’t realize were quite so bad. It’s been a standing joke for 20 years that I carry flash cards so I can subtitle my :new_zealand: wife in real time; :canada: don’t quite seem to get the accent (this is a phenomenon that :new_zealand: acknowledges, with a certain delight.) It seems anything other than a mid-western accent can be outright ignored by these devices, leading to what is justifiably perceived as a disciplinary effect, a colonial imposition latent in the training data and amplified by millions of electronic clones.

I had not heard of “Pickering’s Harem” before.

Edit: So I tested a Google Translate thing that Dr. Fellows, in the program, describes as particularly galling.

Set your translation language to something like Malay, which has no gendered pronouns.

Now… swap the direction of the translation.

Ooops… Time to check your training data, Google.

Edit edit: Don’t play the trailer for “Desk Set” unless you have an empty stomach.

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I only use Siri while driving, requiring a manual button push rather than voice activation, and they now offer (I believe it’s) 5 options, although they all go by Siri: the original, an insipid male voice just like the original, 2 other women, and one other man, who sounds like a young Black man. That’s the one I use, because he uses inflection and emphasis when he speaks, so it makes more sense to me. I always get a weird look the first time someone is in my car and hears him, but then they say “hey, he sort of talks like you do” and yup, that’s exactly right. I need to know if Siri picked up that I was asking a question, or emphasizing something. And it needed to be a man, BECAUSE they keep insisting on making assistants be female-presenting.

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I just don’t like these virtual assistants, in the sense that i don’t need them to talk to me most of the time. I find it an inconvenience since the majority of the time i want the information presented to me via text, not spoken.

And as far as navigation goes, for Google maps i have the voice directions turned off because it likes to mute what i’m listening to so it can give me clear directions (understandable) but frankly i want to listen to my music or podcast and don’t need it randomly muted.

I do have a standalone Garmin GPS and it does use the default female voice, but i keep the volume on it real low. I think if i used a male presenting voice i would hear it less because of the lower register :man_shrugging:

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Just select the Gilbert Godfried voice option. :wink:

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Not against it, but i think i would crash from laughing too much. Or it would stress me out :rofl:

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Darth Vader? “Pray you don’t make me recalculate again”

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Obligs:

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If I ever do use a digital assistant, I want it to be like Tony Stark’s Jarvis, but with Idris Elba’s accent.

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Oh, I don’t have Siri do any navigation for me! Definitely have no interest in a running dialogue. I have an auditory processing disorder, in any case. It’s just that so many people communicate via text these days, and this is how I can listen and answer back without taking my hand off the steering wheel or my eyes off the road. That’s the only use I have for Siri.

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I want a split personality digital assistant voiced by (Michael brain fart) David Tennant, not as the Doctor but as Crowley (or John Knox from Mary Queen of Scots), arguing for control with Freema Agyeman as Amanita Caplan from Sense8.

Oddly specific… I know…

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David Tennant, perhaps?

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You meant David, right?

@chgoliz

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I sometimes use the maps with navigation on, but at some point at least one phone ago, my son changed the voice to male and Irish - I call him Seamus. (I do not care for the default being a woman’s voice as I’m aware of the misogyny behind it.)

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