Women’s voices in technology are still being erased

And it still happens when we hear a woman’s voice as part of a technological product, that we may not know who she is, whether she is real, and if so, she gave us permission to use her voice in that way. Many TikTok users assumed that the voice over voice they heard in the app was not a real person. But it did: it belonged to a Canadian voice actor named Bev Standing, and Standing never allowed ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, to use it.

Standing he complained to the company in May, he complained that the way he used his voice — especially the way users could say anything, including vague words — damaged his ability to develop his brand and lifestyle. His voice brought recognition to what he wanted to say by being known as “that voice of TikTok” without pay, and it hurt his ability to work on his voice.

Then, when TikTok suddenly removed his voice, we found out in the same way that Standing did to everyone else — listening to the change and watching the reports on it. (TikTok has not commented to the press on the change of voice.)

Those who know Apple’s Siri story feel a little déjà vu: Susan Bennett, the woman who gave the original Siri voice, he didn’t even know until his voice was being used for that product. Bennett was replaced by “the English female voice of the United States” and Apple never publicly acknowledged his. Since then, Apple has written secret clauses in voice actor contracts and has recently “said” that its new voicefully generated software“, Eliminating the need to give credit to anyone.

These events reflect a disturbing and common pattern in the technology industry. The way people value, recognize, and pay for their achievements often reflects the position of society as a whole, not actual contributions. One of the reasons the names of Bev Standing and Susan Bennett are so popular on the net is that they are extreme examples of how women’s work is erased, even if it’s where everyone can see — or hear.

When women in technology talk, they are often told to stay calm, especially if they are women of color. Timnit Gebru, Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford, was recently Excluded from Google, where he led an AI ethics team after talking about it worries about the company’s major language models. Margaret Mitchell (PhD from Aberdeen University with a focus on natural language creation) was also a co-director. remove it from its position After talking about Gebru’s shooting. Elsewhere in the industry, txistularis like it Sophie Zhang On Facebook, Susan Fowler At Uber, and many other women they were silenced and often worked in technology companies as a direct or indirect result of mitigating the damage they saw.

Women who found startups could also delete them in real time, and the problem is even worse for women of color. Rumman Chowdhury, a doctor from the University of California, San Diego and a former founder and CEO of Parity, a company based on ethical AI, saw his role in the history of his company. minimized By the New York Times.