BBC’S answer to Alexa is a northern man called ‘Beeb’

New voice assistant avoids received pronunciation and the ‘problem’ of being female and subservient

THE BBC has chosen a northern, male voice for its answer to Amazon’s Alexa, saying it would be problematic to have a female voice in a “subservient” role.

The “warm and friendly” northern accent was selected because the broadcaster wanted “to represent the diversity of the audience” and decided that received pronunciation (RP) would be the wrong thing.

The voice assistant has been named “Beeb” and it is currently in the public testing stage. It will link to on-demand radio, music mixes and podcasts, plus news and local weather updates. It will also provide jokes from The Mash Report and quirky facts from QI.

“We’re really conscious of the sort of problematic associations that exist between female voices and assistants, in that they’re sort of deemed to be being used in that sort of subservient way,” said Andy Webb, BBC head of product for voice and artificial intelligence.

“So we really wanted to make… a point and to put a male voice in there at the start. Secondly, it’s not from down south, it’s from up north. We wanted to make a break from that traditional southern RP that is traditional with all broadcasters.

“What we really find is, when it’s warm and friendly and kind of welcoming and it’s easy on the ears, it actually becomes quite pleasant to listen to, so we worked hard on representing the diversity of our audience much more by making it from outside of that London, southern RP.”

The voice is generically northern – although it hails more from Greater Manchester and Lancashire than Yorkshire – for a reason. A BBC spokesman said: “We deliberately didn’t want the voice to be easily identifiable as being from one place.”

It is a combination of words spoken by a real-life voice actor and computergenerated responses.

The spokesman added: “We chose a male voice for this first version of Beeb because it felt different from the other popular voice assistants people use at the moment.

“We also wanted it to feel more like a real human voice, so that it doesn’t feel too much like you’re speaking to a robot when you speak to Beeb.

“Our ambition in the future is for you to be able to choose from a range of voices you’d like Beeb to have.”

Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri have female voices, as did the first iteration of Google Assistant.

Daniel Rausch, head of Amazon’s Smart Home division, told Business Insider that research showed people find a woman’s voice to be more “sympathetic” and pleasing to the ear.

However, a United Nations report published last year suggested that female voice assistants “reflect, reinforce and spread gender bias” and “force synthetic female voices and personality to defer questions and commands to higher (and often male) authorities”.

It suggested the development of a “neutral machine gender” for voice assistants “that is neither male nor female”.

The beta version of the Beeb app can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store by members of Microsoft Windows Insider Program.