When Neutral Means No One: Voice, Power, and Access
I didn’t realize how much power a voice had until I heard one that wasn’t supposed to exist. It was a synthetic narrator.Super clear. Calm. Conversational. Sophisticated, even. And completely wrong for the story it was telling. It had replaced a human actor for a series on TV. There were some imperfections in that human […]
The Dangerous Myth of the “Neutral” Voice
The voice was clear.Confident.Professional. It just didn’t sound like a person. Something was …off. As we build synthetic voices, there’s a temptation to praise it with how “conversational” it sounds. With that conversational, even a human voice that doesn’t take into consideration the context of what is happening around what it’s saying, the default “neutral” […]