Vice's Virtue Agency Launches Genderless Voice Q to Disrupt Tech Stereotypes
Virtue, a creative agency owned by Vice, unveils Q, a genderless voice designed to challenge the male and female defaults of popular virtual assistants. The project urges major tech companies to adopt inclusive voice technology that breaks away from traditional gender binaries.
Most virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa rely on female default voices to fill service-oriented roles, while male voices handle authoritative tasks like banking. Vice's creative agency Virtue challenges this binary norm by introducing Q, a completely genderless voice developed in collaboration with Copenhagen Pride and several other equality-focused organizations. The project aims to push technology companies to rethink how they design and assign voices to their digital products.
To create Q, researchers record the voices of five non-binary individuals and use specialized software to modulate the audio. They adjust the sound to fall between 145 and 175 Hz, a specific frequency range that linguists define as gender neutral. The team then surveys 4,600 people to rate the voice on a scale from male to female, using this feedback to further refine the audio until it achieves a perfectly ambiguous sound.
Virtue actively encourages the public to share Q with tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft to promote widespread adoption. The agency points out that even when tech companies offer multiple voice options, they still force users to choose between strictly male or female categories. As society moves beyond the traditional gender binary, the creators of Q argue that technology must evolve to reflect and support this cultural shift.