Siri’s tone is casual, but trustworthy. You’ll want to listen to her even if she is a computerized voice and doesn’t really sound human.

She’s well travelled and knowledgeable. Is it going to rain? Is there a shoe repair around here? She’ll tell you.

She’s helpful and her type is familiar — think of the television character Peggy Olson, meeting her advertising bosses’ needs on the series Mad Men.

She’s the personal assistant feature on the new Apple iPhone, she’ll tell your wife you’ll be late for dinner. Or remind you to pick up shirts at the dry cleaners. Note the pronoun she.

Arguably, Siri should be a he. After all, the comforting, accommodating voice is perhaps the final legacy of the brilliant mind of Steve Jobs, who died Wednesday at 56.

The notion of a virtual personal assistant intrigued Jobs for decades. In a 1984 Newsweek interview he talked about his dream of a portable technology that could foresee your needs, wants and, possibly, your thoughts. This is at a time when the CD player was cutting-edge.

“It will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want,” said Jobs. “Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box.”

By 1987, Apple, the company he co-founded, was musing about a “Knowledge Navigator,” a device that looked eerily like an iPad but had Siri’s know-it-all features and voice recognition and response capability. A video released at the time shows an on-screen assistant help a professor prepare lecture notes. The assistant also relays personal reminders: drive Cathy to the airport, a message from his mom telling him about his dad’s surprise birthday.

Despite the sepia tones and leather comfort of the professor’s study, it seems dreamily sci-fi and unattainable.

The most obvious difference between the 1987 vision and today’s Apple innovation is this: While the Knowledge Navigator’s personal assistant was male wearing a bow tie, Siri is female.

How did the vision of Jobs change gender?

Siri’s female tone is not unique. The voice announcing stops on TTC streetcars and subways is female, as is most voice mail.

Clifford Nass, a Stanford University professor who is an authority on the relationships between humans and technology, says the answer is based on traditional gender roles.

“First, it is stereotyping,” Nass says, “Second, it is much easier to find a female voice acceptable to everyone. And third, in certain contexts, female voices are easier to hear.”

Female voices are associated with secretarial duties, reminders to the boss to sign invoices or remember mom’s birthday. Siri’s is a deeper female voice, he says, and therefore “seen as more intelligent and more credible” than a higher voice.

Because of Nass’s work with voice interface, the German car manufacturer BMW called him with a problem in the late ’90s. BMW had to recall an in-car navigation system which featured a female voice. “Drivers didn’t want to take directions from a female,” he says. The drivers were mostly men and his task was to find a voice they would find acceptable. “It showed these stereotypes were so powerful. I had not imagined how powerful.”

People forget they are working with a machine, Nass’s research shows. He found that even though the drivers knew they were not listening to a real human voice, they were behaving same way toward technology as they would to human beings. The same expectations and prejudices applied.

The voice the BMW drivers finally found acceptable was one that sounded like a co-pilot, relatively deep, medium volume, moderate pitch range and slightly faster than average speed.

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As Nass wrote about the experiment, the voice had the personality of someone “who could take over when the driver was in trouble but who understood that the driver (pilot) was in charge: male, not at all dominant, somewhat friendly and highly competent.”

His work with BMW led to him to study how people respond to male and female voices and other gender issues and books including Wired for Speech and The Man Who Lied to His Laptop. Another of his findings: women tend to like female voices more and men tend to like male voices.

Though conceived by Apple decades ago, Siri was developed in defence research. The company did not respond to queries about why the program is called Siri, but it’s possible its namesake is a non-profit research organization called SRI International, which studies artificial intelligence and had a project on voice-assisted software. SRI developed the project, which was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), into a separate business which Apple bought in 2010.

The military has been interested in voice-activated technology for a long time, says Nass. They want to help soldiers get data and answers — when will reinforcements arrive? — quickly, hands free and eyes free.

A DARPA video on the capabilities of a voice-assisted program has both male and female voices responding to uniformed officers in a control room. The female voice helps the officers with personnel questions and sets up briefing meetings; the male voice describes tank movements and aircraft landings.

That Siri’s voice is natural and colloquial is also no accident. Researchers work hard to create an appealing voice personality. University of Toronto computer scientist Gerald Penn says getting the tone right is difficult.

For voice programs like Siri, researchers first listen to what real people say, he explains. It’s not unusual for staff members to go home and record conversations, getting both content and context. They transcribe the dialogues then get professional readers, people who know how to modulate their voices for qualities such as pitch or speed, to speak into a microphone.

That leads to technology that can provide a gentle reminder to remember the umbrella when the forecast calls for rain.

The umbrella thing sounds simple. But to the inventor of the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, the personal assistant is capable of so much more.

“You’d start to teach it about yourself,” Jobs said way back in that 1984 interview. “And it would just keep storing all this information about you and maybe it would recognize that every Friday afternoon you like to do something special, and maybe you’d like it to help you with this routine. So about the third time it asks you: ‘Well, would you like me to do this for you every Friday?’ You say, ‘Yes,’ and before long it becomes an incredibly powerful helper. It goes with you everywhere you go. It knows most of the raw information in your life that you’d like to keep, but then starts to make connections between things, and one day when you’re 18 and you’ve just split up with your girlfriend it says: ‘You know, Steve, the same thing has happened three times in a row.’”

And that, as Jobs surely concluded, is the kind of thing a woman would say.

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