Computer Voice

"There are now five minutes to atomic self-destruct."

— Gladys Stevens (voice of the main computer) in The Andromeda Strain

In Speculative Fiction, computers can speak. It certainly beats having the audience read a computer screen. Most of the time the voice is female (theories on why vary, see below) to emphasize the "otherness" of the A.I.'s nature, but there are many examples of male and gender-neutral synthesized voices. Generally, they all carry a pleasant (if somewhat dull) monotone. If it should ever become (or started out with) a Creepy Monotone, watch out.

The gender will vary depending on the intentions of the computer. If it is designed to be utilitarian, military-like, then it will be male. If it is supposed to be very user friendly for the tech-ignorant, then it will be female. The Star Trek franchise even shows this evolution: in the original series the female voice was always used when accessing encyclopedic information. The movies were more military-like, so it used a male voice. The Next Generation era computers were simply the most user-friendly computer possible short of reading your thoughts.

This has been referred to as the most common sci-fi female character archetype. That is, since Most Writers Are Male, and the Sci Fi Ghetto is particularly associated with male fans, there are a disproportionate number of male characters but somehow the idea of the female computer has gotten lodged into the collective unconscious. Probably not coincidentally, these A.I.'s will have long, largely nonsensical descriptions whose acronyms 'just happen' to spell feminine names. For example, the Computer-Human Liaison Officer Executable, or CHLOE for short.

It's a bit deeper than a simple case of Most Writers Are Male. Culturally, unfamiliar female voices are taken as less threatening than male ones, particularly low-pitched male ones. That's why male voices in interface systems tend to be higher-pitched rather than in the James Earl Jones registers. They aren't as off-putting.

The tendency toward female voices may stem from Real Life: Companies initially hired teenage boys as telephone operators, but by 1900 the vast majority of them were female. Not only were the voices soothing, but the women tended not to be, well, hormonal balls of rage. It is also possible that the ability to pay women less than men was another added benefit.

Additionally, studies have shown that under stressful conditions, like being in the middle of an aerial dogfight, it's easier to understand what a female voice is saying compared to male voices. With this in mind, it makes sense to give a feminine voice to systems that are very important to listen to.

Also worth mentioning: the naval tradition of giving ships feminine names, as well as giving abstract ideas a female Anthropomorphic Personification (Reason, Liberty, Justice, Rumor, the goddess of wisdom, etc.) is very, very old. Stands to reason it would extend to giving spaceships female names, and since the computer is the "brain" of the ship...

See also: Electronic Speech Impediment. If a computer-generated voice is being used to play a role in media or a franchise, it's Synthetic Voice Actor.

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Feminine Voice Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Persocoms in Chobits, but those have female computer bodies, too...
• The voice of Raising Heart, the first Device we encounter in Lyrical Nanoha, is that of a female's. Of course, Bardiche, the next Device we see, averts this by being having a male voice. Same with the next Device. And the next Device. And the next Device... as of the third Season, straight usages of this trope seems to be in a minority, with only Raising Heart, Mach Caliber and Blitz Caliber, Kerykeion and Storm Raider having female voices.
  • Both Klarwind (which doesn't speak very much), The Book of Darkness/Tome of the Night Sky and Zest's Spear have female voices as well. And then of course there's Reinforce and Reinforce Zwei.

Comic Books

• Aida from Squadron Supreme.
• Motherboard from Wildguard who can store up to 10 picabytes and, when she was younger, was larger than most rooms.

Films — Animation

• Mars Express: Mostly averted, although the setting is futuristic and features many robots. Except for a few large computers, most machines speak very naturally. At some point a robot has to say "I am a robot" in a vocal conversation so as to justify not needing breakfast.
• In Voices of a Distant Star, the computer speaks in an English accent. An unusual choice of a female voice given it's a Humongous Mecha.
• The computer doing the countdown to the escape pod self-destructing in WALL•E. Played straight in several other places too, but again averted by AUTO (since, after all, he's an homage to HAL).

Films — Live-Action

• The Alien series, to which Sigourney Weaver's casting in WALL•E was an ironic Shout-Out. (In Alien, she once screamed at onboard computer MU-TH-R, "You bitch!") The countdown-expositing computer voice in Aliens was also female.
  • In Alien: Resurrection the ship's computer is called FATHER. It of course has a male voice.
• In The Andromeda Strain, the computer in the secret underground base plays pre-recorded messages spoken by a... pleasant female voice. A minor subversion: The voice actually belongs to a 60-year-old woman. The voice is arguably the Trope Codifier for, if not the Computer Voice, then the use of the Computer Voice to pleasantly announce really unpleasant information.

• Battle Beyond the Stars. Nanelia has been raised by androids that speak with a noticable reverb, but she's introduced repairing one of them who sings for her while on the operating table. Presumably that particular android was modified for that function.
• In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix there was a voice like this speaking for the elevator at the Ministry of Magic.
• The guidance system in James Bond's BMW in Tomorrow Never Dies. ("Don't let her push you around.")
  • Q even comments that hopefully James will pay attention due to the voice being female.
• Logan's Run. The voice of the Master Computer is female; the director believing that the male Sandmen would feel more comfortable with such a voice.
• The voice of the spaceship computer in Red Planet.
• Sunshine (2007). The voice of Icarus is female.
• In Spaceballs - calmly announces the Self Destruct Sequence in the Megamaid/Spaceball 01 craft. A little slow to remind of a cancellation button and teases over the number seven. Remains polite to the very end, wishing people to "have a nice day" before exploding.
• Gallaxhar's ship computer in Monsters vs. Aliens has a feminine voice, who can also be wrong about the self-destruct timer.
• VIKI in I, Robot.
• The voice of the Tumbler Batmobile's autopilot computer from the The Dark Knight Trilogy of Batman movies.
• The computer in Fortress 2 was female with a New Zealand accent, just one of the many unintentionally funny aspects of that film. It's probably funnier if you're from New Zealand or Australia.
• Starting with Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony Stark's masculine JARVIS has been replaced by an Irish accented feminine voice named FRIDAY. JARVIS is too busy being The Vision these days.
  • Spider-Man: Homecoming gives Peter a suit designed by Tony, with an initially nameless AI that he would eventually name Karen. Eventually, Peter would be given control of a sophisticated defense system created by Tony in case of his death. Its voice, while female, is nothing like FRIDAY or Karen's. Its name: EDITH, standing for "Even Dead, I'm The Hero."
• The base computer in Pacific Rim speaks with a female voice - specifically, a less snarky version of GLaDOS's.
• I Am Mother. The eponymous Mother is a mechanical robot with the voice of Rose Byrne. Given that its role is to raise children, a more gentle, empathic voice would be needed. This becomes a brief plot point when the Woman who enters the bunker fails to realise the "mother" she overhears Daughter talking to is the same as the Killer Robots who have been hunting her for years.

Literature

• In The City Who Fought the shellperson running the titular Space Station city is male, but he adopts a feminine voice when making announcements - such as when he tries to call an emergency drill to discomfit his brawn when she finally gets a chance to relax and she chews him out, so he has to tell the station that this was a test and they can return to their stations.
• Robert A. Heinlein's works:
  • Minerva in Time Enough for Love and Gay Deceiver in The Number of the Beast.
  • Dora, Lazarus Long's shipboard computer in both of the above works. She has a young girl's voice.
• There's a subversion of sorts in Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness where the computer is actually wired to a woman's brain - and it'll only give him the information he wants if he has sex with her (and can manage to keep her satisfied while he's asking all of his questions).
• Averted in one of Anne McCaffrey's Acorna books. A male character who spends long stretches of time with no one but his cat and his ship's computer changed its voice from the default female, because apparently hearing a female voice made him stop at whorehouses too often.
• In Andrey Livadny's The History of the Galaxy series, the voice of the serv-machine AIs is feminine, by default, for male pilots and masculine for females. In fact, thanks to the pilots associating voice with gender, the AIs themselves, thanks to the neural links, begin to take on more sexualized characteristics in their personalities. A number of novels revolve around radical cases when an AI would somehow end up in a human body (through a brain implant) and become the pilot's romantic partner.
• The Star Trek: New Frontier books gave a shoutout to the original Enterprise computer voice when Morgan Primus, who was also Number One in the pilot (played by Majel Barret) is destroyed and transports her mind into the ship's computers, only marginally changing the voice.
• The Andromeda Strain. The computer in the Wildfire secret underground base plays pre-recorded messages spoken by a pleasant female voice. It is revealed that the voice, which one scientist describes as "luscious," is that of a woman in her 60's, turning it into in-universe Fetish Retardant. The book points out that the most sexy voice the military could find is used for voice reminder systems on the theory that men will pay more attention to it. However when the same voice plainly announces the nuclear countdown, Stone and Hall find this extremely infuriating.

Live-Action TV

• In Babylon 5, the all-purpose computers in people's quarters have a female voice. Although when Garibaldi reboots the station's main computer as a security measure, he restores a forgotten feature - a very snarky personality called "Sparky" with a male voice (provided by Harlan Ellison, who worked on the series as a consultant). Garibaldi hates it, and spends most of his time in that episode trying to get rid of it, but it's the snark and not the gender of the voice that he finds grinding.
• Doctor Who: In "The Doctor Dances", Captain Jack's Chula warship has a female voice that tells him the exact odds of his survival.
• SARAH in Eureka, the main hero's smart house. And her voice is actually an alteration of her creator, the Plucky Comic Relief Butt-Monkey computer nerd character. Freaky coming from Fargo.
  • He wanted to use Sarah Michelle Gellar's voice, but she didn't return his calls.
  • Then there's FRED, the prototype military AI which Fargo used as SARAH's core, who gets reactivated in one episode and attempts to kill humans (actually kills a pizza delivery guy). Naturally, FRED has a deep male, unemotional voice.
• In Helix, Research, Inc. Arctic Biosystems has a neutral, not unpleasant female voice that makes periodic announcements and status alerts, including when Patient Zero breaks out of isolation, and also announces the Previously on… segment.
• In one episode of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Wayne turns his home into a smart house with a pleasant female voice with the primary directive of protecting the family. His wife takes a disliking to the computer (and the voice) and, after the house, naturally, goes crazy, demands that the voice be changed. She suggests George Clooney's voice, prompting Wayne to protest that she would never leave the house.
• Despite having a male name (Gideon) the time ship's computer in Legends of Tomorrow has a female voice (and avatar).
• Ziggy from Quantum Leap has a female voice in the one episode set back in 1999. This despite being referred to as male for the ENTIRE FIVE SEASONS of the show.
• The future computer in SeaQuest DSV has a feminine voice. An escaped AI-piloted attack sub has a masculine voice, but only because it was programmed with Bridger's personality.
• Throughout the Star Trek franchise, the computer was, with a rare exception, voiced by Gene Rodenberry's wife Majel Barrett. One episode in TNG absolutely had to have Lwaxana Troi (also played by Majel) get mad at the computer. In the season 1 episode "11001001" we had a male voice for arming the auto destruct and evacuation of the ship.
  • Both Whitfield's The Making of Star Trek and David Gerrold's World of Star Trek books cited the fact that military and civilian pilots (like Gene) reported finding female voices easier to hear and this was why the female voices became standard (and thus why the Enterprise used one).
  • In the first Mirror Universe episode, there's an interesting reaction shot when Kirk and McCoy discover that ISS Enterprise has a male computer voice. They're not precisely startled, but they pause for a moment to glance at each other.
  • Averted with the Cardassians and Romulans. This is in fact used in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager (titled "Dreadnought") when a Federation computer fights to take over a Cardassian system. A male and female voice stating what they're trying to in counterpoint was actually an interesting dramatic device. However the Cardassian space station Terok Nor later to be known as Starbase Deep Space Nine used a female voice. Deep Space Nine's voiceover was a different actress, Judi Durand, and the voice is lower and a bit less friendly, befitting the Cardassians. (All Federation computers in the Deep Space Nine series are still Barrett, though.)
    • The missile computer's voice is actually B'Elanna's, as when she reprogrammed it as a Maquis, she was sick of the unemotional masculine voice.
  • In "Tomorrow is Yesterday", there's some comic relief involving the Enterprise computer becoming flirty, due to having been repaired by female engineers who thought it needed a personality.
  • The Star Trek Continues series has Marina Sirtis doing the computer voice. A nice Shout-Out. There was a movement to cast Sirtis for the computer voice in Enterprise as well. However, Enterprise is a prequel taking place before computers were voiced; the one time we hear a computer voice, it's with a ship from the TOS era, naturally still voiced by Barrett.

Pinball

• The supercomputer in Bally's Xenon speaks with the synthesized voice of musician Suzanne Ciani.
• The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot, voiced by singer Stephanie Rogers.
• In Safe Cracker, the CANDY 2000 security system has one of these.
• One guides the player in Johnny Mnemonic.

Radio

• Spoofed in a sketch from That Mitchell And Webb Sound where a voice actress is recording safety announcements for meltdown in a nuclear power station, and is asked to "make it a bit sexier." After all, hers may be the last voice people ever hear.

Video Games

• The Combine Overwatch voice in Half-Life 2 and the Episodes falls under this trope.
  • The original Half-Life has the breaking/broken PA system, and the HEV suit's voice.
  • The French HEV Suit's voice could be either gender.
  • The Fan Remake of Half-Life, Black Mesa, plays with this by having the PA system use the female voice from the tram until the military takes control of it, at which point it changes mid-sentence to a very intimidating male voice.
• EVA from Command & Conquer.
  • Red Alert had a male voice though, and the sequels had the male CABAL as well.
• Halo:
  • Female AIs in general whenever they're delivering status alerts, notably Cortana.
  • Forerunner Monitors tend to have somewhat higher-pitched voices, even when their programming is male.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid Prime: The Power Suit has no voice in the original NTSC release, but it was added to the PAL and Metroid Prime Trilogy versions. Its lines in all three Prime games are limited to simple phrases such as "Recording to logbook" and "Data received".
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: The Power Suit has its voice in all regions.
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: The Power Suit again has its voice. This game also adds the voices of Aurora Unit 242 and Samus' Gunship.
  • Metroid Fusion: The voice of the BSL's alarm system is female.
  • Metroid Dread: Samus' Gunship again has a feminine voice.
• Portal:
  • GLaDOS. In the first game she was rather monotonous, while in the second game she's a bit more expressive. As it turns out, she's more than just an A.I. though, originally being a human whose consciousness was forced into a computer.
  • Also the turrets. Interestingly, the defective turrets in the sequel sound like a male stand-up comedian.
• System Shock, but SHODAN sounds much less calm after she goes rampant: she suffers heavy vocal distortion and frequent stutters, with her vocal pitch and rate of speech varying wildly from line to line. It's implied she's doing this on purpose, for some unknown reason.
• The automated female intercom voice of the Shelter in Penumbra, whom chimes in every now and then with random prerecorded announcements. She also takes on a SHODAN-like speech impediment when heard on a CD-ROM briefing, and in the surreal expansion Requiem.
• "Betty" in X: Beyond the Frontier is somewhere between the two. It's strange sounding.
  • In following games of the X-Universe series, it has a more natural-souding monotone female voice. X: Rebirth tones down the monotonous nature of Betty's voice.
• StarCraft. The adjutant is more cyborg than computer, but still a she and responsible for a lot of basic stuff like that.
  • As far as actual gameplay goes though (in other words, ignoring the single line of dialogue in the first Terran campaign where the adjutant actually acts as a computer), the Executor and the Zerg Overmind, both undoubtedly male, serve the same purpose.
• The 'Mech systems in MechWarrior 2 and MechWarrior 3; note that from MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries onwards, the voice changed, sounding a lot less computer-y and more like a recording of a talking human. MechWarrior Living Legends reverts back to a highly artificial voice, complete with Mad Libs Dialogue.
  • The Ghost Bear's Legacy expansion pack for MechWarrior 2 had a male voice saying the same things the female voice would say in the main title. It was a very efficient reminder of why female voices are usually preferred.
• Psychonauts: Ford Cruller's minecart that transports you around the campground has a woman's voice that communicates heavily in Double Entendre.
• A.D.A., the A.I. of Jehuty in Zone of the Enders.
• AURA, the onboard ship AI in EVE Online.
• Descent and Descent II both, calmly announcing "Self Destruct Sequence... activated", as well as the final countdown. It also calls you a "cheater!"
• In a departure from the other games (well technically, previous two games), you have a female-voiced AI helpfully exclaiming terms such as "Engage", "Pull Up", and "Bullseye". The game? Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere.
• In a bit of humorous lampshading, the M.A.R.Go.T (Metro Authority Rapid Governmental Transit System) from Fallout 3 is voiced as a female. The engineer responsible was forced to reprogram everything just to give it a female voice.
  • The voice can be more frequently heard from Robobrain units roaming the Capital Wasteland. They will not hesitate to cheerfully announce their murderous intent while some will moan about their inability to do anything but attack you. At least one character in-game has expressed a Perverse Sexual Lust for these units (and properly spent some time recuperating from the ill effects he gotten from one of its attacks).
• The Stealth Suit Mk II in Fallout: New Vegas DLC Old World Blues has female voice.
• EDI, the main computer of the Normandy in Mass Effect 2.
• In Borderlands 2, Hyperion computers (especially the New-U Stations) all speak with the same calm, pleasant female voice. Lampshaded by Claptrap when he fails to unlock a security door and the voice tells him Hyperion troops are on their way
  I'm sorry! I'm sorry, pretty female voice!
  • In "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep", where everything is written by Tina, a New-U Station computer might actually complain about having to speak in that pleasant tone all the time.
  • Subverted by all of the talking guns. One used to be a combat robot, and has an unnaturally deep male voice. Another was designed to make you feel like garbage, so it has a harsh female voice that's always criticizing you. The third is a supposedly cursed weapon with a shrill female voice that never stops shrieking and drove all of its previous users insane.
• In the first game of the Outpost franchise, the computer/AI that assists you has a female, somewhat robotic voice. Her default name? Aphrodite.
• Likewise, in Outpost 2, the Savant series computers have a distinctly female but electronic voice.
• Cassie from Perception (2017) uses a text-to-speech app on her phone called Delphi. She's blind, so she can't do it herself.

Webcomics

• Today Nothing Happened - The car's GPS''
  I have her set on British so I always imagine her as Mary Poppins, except years older, and jaded, with a bottle of whiskey-
  You are over the speed limit!
  I know honey, calm down.
• Lovelace, Professor Madblood's AI computer in Narbonic, is programmed to sound like Jennifer Connelly.

Western Animation

• Codename: Kids Next Door: The computer for Sector V talks in a female voice from time to time.'She' is also shown to have emotions worthy of a woman, as seen in one episode where she is in love with numbuh 1, and jealous of Lizzie for being his girlfriend. It also seems that all K.N.D. tree houses have the same female computer voice, shown in the episode "I.T.", where the computer announces how much time is left in the game of 'tag' over the world.
  Computer: 15 seconds to the end of operation I.T.
  Numbuh 2: Noooooo!
  Computer: Yes.
• Darkwing Duck: The D-2000 computer in the episode "Star-Crossed Circuits", a crimefighting computer with a female voice. She gets reprogrammed with a soap opera and becomes a histrionic Stalker with a Crush towards DW. W.A.N.D.A., DW's crimefighting computer in the DuckTales (2017) two-parter "Let's Get Dangerous!", also has a female voice, but a Deadpan Snarker personality.

• Invader Zim: Tak's Ship is programmed with Tak's own personality, it remains loyal to her even after falling into Dib's personality.
  • Turned briefly male when Dib managed to program his own personality into it, but with disasterous results.
• Kim Possible: There's one in the episode "Monkey Ninjas in Space." Also, the talking car SADIE in "Car Trouble."
• ReBoot: The System Voice.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM): Sally's personal computer Nicole.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Plankton's computer/wife is a bit of a subversion, as he often argues with her.
• Totally Spies!:
  • G.L.A.D.I.S. (Gadget Lending And Distribution Interactive System) has a fully-formed personality of the snarky variety; not afraid to talk back to her human superiors or refuse to do things she considers beneath her, she’s also been known to dabble in origami and magic tricks.
  • The Love Computer - an electronic matchmaking device featured in one episode - has a similar voice to G.L.A.D.I.S. and is even more overtly snarky (so much so that one of the spies even draws attention to the similarities).

Real Life

• Most talking calculators, clocks and watches used by the blind feature a female voice.
• On military aircraft, there is a voice reminder system affectionately referred to as "Bitchin' Betty." This is the voice that gives you helpful tips such as "Pull...up. Pull...up." when you're so close to blacking out that you can't see straight and you are about to turn $40M of military hardware into a very large lawn dart. It turns out that the military did research on the voice, and found that pilots respond more quickly to female voices. The same study noted that pilots respond even more quickly to strongly worded commands, but nobody wanted to explain why they spent $10M teaching airplanes to shout "Pull the * BLEEP* up!" It was also found that higher voices were more easily heard when there was other noise going on.
  • Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert), believes that most of these devices are programmed by geeky men, who want something that sounds like a beautiful woman and asks to be touched in precise ways.
  • Bitching Betty also lives on civilian aircraft, helpfully warning you of everything from approaching terrain to stall conditions.
• Apple computers have voice synthesizers. The default voice falls under this trope, although you have the option to switch to older female, 30-something male, boy and girl, and even a robot- or alien-like voice.
  • Siri has a female voice in several versions. Hers is adjustable, though - you can have male or female voices with multiple accents to choose from. Alas, no robot voice.
• The DecTalk speech synthesizer features "Beautiful Betty", "Rough Rita" and "Whispering Wendy" in its collection of selectable voices.
• The "Echo" speech synthesizer (mainly for use with the Aple 2E) did release a female version.
• GPS systems, particularly those designed for cars, often have young female voices. (Ostensibly these are supposed to sound the most soothing, a useful trait when you've just missed your turn for the fifth time and you're in a maze of one-way streets. They're also easier to hear when there's other noise going on). Some devices allow you to change the default voice between male and female options.
  • Discussed in Date Night when Phil Foster ignores the GPS's advice in favor of a "short cut". Claire asserts that, "It's because it's a woman's voice. If that thing had John Madden's voice, you would listen to it."

• Automotive voice command systems in general, including but not limited to GM's OnStar and Ford's Sync.
  • A notable aversion comes from Mercedes-Benz, whose COMAND system has a female voice with a very harsh, low-toned quality. Between the less-than-pleasant voice and the complete lack of politeness "fluff speech," owners occasionally refer to COMAND as "The Grumpy German."
    • On Top Gear (UK) when Richard Hammond tested the Aston Martin V8 Vantage Roadster (which he points out is from the Ford era) he lamented, "Why when they programmed the SatNav and recorded the voice commands did they hire the warden from a women's prison? Said voice sounds like a robotic version of Anne Robinson.
• The SkyTrain rapid transit system in Vancouver, British Columbia, uses a pleasant female voice to announce arrival at each station. TransLink has recently introduced a similar feature on some buses. The SeaBus between downtown Vancouver and the North Shore uses an upbeat male voice to announce the mandatory safety features.
• The Washington, D.C. Metrorail system held a contest, and a local woman gives all of the recorded announcements the train makes. These include Please stand clear of the closing doors and When boarding, please allow customers to exit before boarding the train. The announcement of stops is made by the train operator, whether it's a man or a woman.
• In the late 1990s, the London Underground was considering using the voice of Marilyn Monroe for its announcements. A news article commented that instead of a Streetcar Named Desire, they'd have a Subway That Sounds Like Sex.
• The Minneapolis Light Rail has all of its announcements done by a female voice. It's rather businesslike, more so than some other examples here.
• Microsoft has released a counter to Apple's Siri called Cortana. Naturally, Cortana is voiced by Jen Taylor. Most commercials tend to pit Cortana vs. Siri and inevitably end with Siri appearing as inferior. Cortana also sounds less machine-like than Siri. Amazon's Echo devices use Alexa. The default voice in Google Home devices is female.

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Masculine Voice Examples:

Film

• Example numero uno: "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
  • In fact, HAL may have preceded this trope. May.
  • Originally HAL was meant to be female, but it was changed in the last minute.
• Another aversion, or maybe this one is a subversion: The refurbished Enterprise's computer voice in the Star Trek movies is male.
• Another Alien example: In Alien: Resurrection, the voice of the computer on the military vessel USM Auriga was male, and named Father, in contrast to MU-TH-R from the first film.
• JARVIS, from the Iron Man movie. (Actually named for the Avengers' butler in the comicverse. Speculation abounds, especially since Agent Carter actually introduces the man himself.) There is now an official JARVIS app, providing the snarky voice of Paul Bettany for everyone to enjoy. It allows limited voice control.
• The Voice of the Pod's computer in Innerspace. Although it gives most of its information in a level & businesslike tone, when the Pod is in danger it gains a note of urgency.
  • "Approaching Tricuspid valve of Heart! Do not enter, do not enter Heart!"
  • (said with a note of fustration) "Thruster Inoperative!"
• MCP in TRON has a deep, male voice. It also sounds like its creator Ed Dillinger.
• Edgar from Electric Dreams.
• Red Planet
  • The voice of the Mars rover appears to be a variant of the Microsoft Mike voice.
  • Neil Ross (uncredited) voices the computers that monitor the status of the spacesuits.
• Mars Attacks!: the translating computer uses a male voice.

Literature

• Hex's voice in the Discworld novels seems to be male, possibly because no alternative would ever occur to the wizards.
• Mycroft in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress uses a male voice primarily.
• Receives a Lampshade Hanging in the novelization of Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom: While the computers on Confederation and Border Worlder ships use a soothing female voice (because the pilots like it better), Black Lance ships instead have a stern male voice for their computers.
• Webmind in the WWW Trilogy has a variety of male voices. Initially he used the sort of synthesised voices you get with text-to-speech programs and at one point he is described as sounding like a GPS. Later on he settles on immitating a male voice actor in an effort to be more human-friendly.
• The toaster owned by the family of the main character and the artificial intelligence running Dr. X's laboratory in the book Popular Clone are all male.

Live-Action TV

• "All the Troubles of the World": Multivac's voice is a light tenor with a reverberation added.
• Blake's 7. The many voices of Peter Tuddenham as the wise Zen, irritable Orac, and sycophantic Slave.
• In the short-lived British comedy Come Back Mrs. Noah, the computer voice has a Jamaican accent, having been programmed by a company in Notting Hill Gate.

• The computer voice of the time machine in Guest from the Future.
• The various technology-based Transformation Trinkets from Kamen Rider from Kamen Rider Ryuki onwards all have male voices. Worth noting is IXA, Kamen Rider Kiva's Rival, where the computer voice pronounces each syllable separately and very robotically in nigh incomprehensible Gratuitous English ("I-KU-SA NAK-KU-RU RA-I-ZU AP-PU" ^note "IXA Knuckle, rise up." The IXA Knuckle being the device he uses to transform.). However, Ryuki itself has Pseudo-Rider Alternative, whose computer voice is female.
  • Starting with OOO, the Riders' equipment gains more singsongy phrases that are clearly not meant to sound like a computerized assistant, for Merchandise-Driven purposes. It's actually lampshades in Gaim; the whimsical and totally deranged, it turns out engineer who created that series' Rider equipment it just thought the phrases sounded cool.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One seems to use a basic English text-to-speech program to finish off the transformation sequence. Starting with a hot-blooded "Authorise! Progrise! Tobiaga Rise! Rising Hopper!" followed by a very robotic "A jump to the sky turns to a Rider Kick". In fact, all Riders and forms from that series have a longer phrase in English that sounds more computerized. (Oh, and the English is surprisingly good, but not perfect.)
  • Kamen Rider Revice: The Demons Driver has Kenjiro Tsuda's baritone announcing its transformation sequence in a robotic manner, with a second, much deeper voice repeating the English words it says in Japanese. Double Subverted in that the Driver is possessed by Vail, who intentionally makes himself sound like one, but the mass-produced versions of the Driver keeps his voice for the announcements.
    Demons Driver: Decide Up! Deep. (FUKAKU.) Drop. (OCHIRU.) Danger. (KIKI. KAMEN) Rider. DEMONS!
  • Kamen Rider Geats: The Desire Driver has a robotic voice announcing its different forms, though it's a lot livelier than other examples to make it sound somewhat like a gameshow host.
    Desire Driver: Dual On! Get ready for Boost and Magnum. Ready, fight.
• KITT in Knight Rider has a soft male voice (William Daniels, better known as Mister Feeny this side of The '90s, originally; Val Kilmer in the new series), likely due to it being intended as a military vehicle. KITT's Evil Twin KARR has a much deeper male voice (Peter Cullen, who also voiced Optimus Prime in The Transformers).
  • In the new series, KARR transforms into a robot, making the choice of using Peter Cullen again even more appropriate.
• The Lexx from Lexx is a very unusual case of this. The ship is biological technology and although the voice it uses is male, the ship itself is actually female.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: "Megazord sequence has been initiated... Megazord activated!"
• Mr Smith from The Sarah Jane Adventures is a living being that takes the form of a large computer, and talks appropriately, with the voice of Alexander Armstrong.
• Super Sentai is starting to follow suit with the more recent series. Change! Goseiger! and GOOOOOOOOOKAIGER! Yes, even the Gokaigers' morphers are Hot-Blooded.
  • In the more recent transitions to Power Rangers, while the toys retain their own version of the system voices, the show itself tends to omit them completely, the last case of having a system voice being in Power Rangers Dino Charge.
• UFO (1970): 'SID' [Satellite Intruder Detector] averts the usual trope by speaking in a deep, plummy male voice. A deleted scene even has 'him' singing "Home on the Range" as he floats through space.
• Now the Ultra Series has taken notes from Rider and Sentai, starting with Ultraman Ginga.

Pinball

• The Killer Robot of Robot speaks in a distinctively digital Machine Monotone voice.

Radio

• Eddie, the ship's computer of the starship Heart of Gold, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978). (Although it's mentioned, and briefly demonstrated, that he has an alternative personality with a female voice and mannerisms.)
  • Geoffrey McGivern's voice of supercomputer Deep Thought is deep and imposing, but Valentine Dyall's take on it from the TV series and records sends reverberations throughout the universe.

Tabletop Games

• Friend Computer in the RPG Paranoia. How human it actually sounds is of course up to the gamemaster, but some flavor of Dissonant Serenity is often present.

Video Games

• The computer voice in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is male. "Please don't go. The Drones need you. They look up to you!" although one of the several Datalink-readers is female.
• As noted above, Nod used a male AI, CABAL in place of the female EVA in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. In comparison, CABAL displayed much more independent thinking and eventually revolted in the Firestorm Expansion Pack.
  • The various Cores the Empire of the Rising Sun deploys in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3.
• In Fallout, the Master had three voices, and used them to accentuate the point he wanted to make. He had his normal "exposition" voice, an "angry" male voice, and a soft, almost joyous female voice that he used whenever he said something he wanted you to like, or when he was on the defensive, such as:
  The Master: "I am no villain..."
  • An example of how the voices are used: One Master line is, "Join us or die. Join. Die! Join. Die!" The normal text is "Exposition Master", the italics are "Female Master", and the bold is "Angry Master".
• Crysis' Nanosuit has a male voice as default, but allows you to switch to a female one in the options menu. The sequel has a male-only voice, which sounds much more robotic than in the previous game.
• Fallout 3 has Mister Gutsies and Sentry Bots as masculine voice-emitting bots. Mister Gutsies (and one companion you can have) will often shout pro-American, anti-Chinese lines (since it is built originally for war against Chinese invasion) with amusing results. The Sentry Bot on the other hand, sounds very cold and machinelike, for good reasons too...
  • The Prototype Medic Armor also have voice similar to Mister Gutsies.
  • Liberty Prime sounds like a Mister Gutsy on steroids.
• Cyberpunk 2077 has this in various forms. The AI for the automated Delamain cabs speaks with a posh male British accent (when they aren't suffering breakdowns that make them skittish or violent). There is also Adam Smasher, Arasaka's top enforcer and a Full-Conversion Cyborg whose menacingly deep voice is made all the more unsettling by its electronic rasp.
• Securitrons in Fallout: New Vegas also has rather cold male voice, though not as much as Sentry Bots since they seemingly able to express sarcasm and excitement to some extent.
• The on-board computer ANGUS in Millennia: Altered Destinies has a masculine voice and always sounds calm and soothing, even in critical situations. This helps, since you only really ever hear him talk, even when communicating with representatives of four alien species. Their grunts and squeaks are translated by ANGUS in his own voice.
• In Portal 2 Wheatley (And the other personality spheres) are male, as is the "Backup" AI that guides you through the first test chambers & later announces general facility information & procedures. This backup appears separate from the main facilty AI as they can converse, but much more limited in its interractions.
• All three time zones and the present time in the first The Journeyman Project game have male computer voices in the Pegasus Prime remake, compared to the largely female voices in Turbo. Course, the time zones in question (save for 200 million BC) are all future history periods.
  • Gage Blackwood's apartment in Pegasus Prime has a British-accented computer of its own that runs the devices there, and the TSA gave him a female AI on a Biochip that acts as the text window in Turbo.
  • There's even a male computer voice in the World Science Center in 2310 that has an Australian accent, and the Turbo version has an Asian actress for the Japanese Mars Colony in 2185. The three evil robots in these time zones don't count.
  • In the second and third games, your AI Arthur has a friendly but a little snarky voice.
• Still in X-Universe: Contrasting with the ships' autopilot, the stations' "Automated Interaction System" is a male voice. Like with the autopilot, it was heavilly filtered in the first game, but it was made more natural in later ones. However, the announces are still voiced by a female.
  • Also, the welcome message becomes more formal the more the player reputation with the owner race is high.
  • Curiously, Pirate stations' voices are not very monotone, and not formal at all.
  Hello matey! An hearty welcome aboard this pirate station!
• The AI voice in Heavy Gear video games was inspired by the one in the MechWarrior 2 games, due to Activision losing the rights to the latter, then gaining the rights to make the former. The computer voice had a male register and spoke in an extremely curt noticeably stitched-together Received Pronunciation accent, usually to tell you that you'd gotten yourself shot up.
  "Leg, damaged. Torso, damaged. Autocannon, destroyed."
• The Turing Test: TOM has a deep, male voice, which sounds more than a little like Jeremy Irons.
• VAL in Startopia is a parody of HAL, but has a pleasant British (if a bit snarky) accent (voiced by William Franklyn).
• Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey: Invoked — the Virtual Librarian is an electronic version of Wishbone and has a computer-generated voice, sounding just like Wishbone's but with a faint electronic hum to it.

Visual Novels

• Monodam in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony speaks in a stereotypical computer voice to emphasize his more robotic nature compared to the other Monokubs. In the original Japanese version, his dialogue is written in katakana in place of hiragana, and in English, his sentences are in all caps and his words are separated by hyphens, JUST-LIKE-THIS.

Web Original

• The Emperor's "voice actor" in If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device is apparently an actual text-to-speech device - in fact, the Emperor getting a TTS is the entire premise of the show. He sounds like regular text-to-speech devices with masculine, non-emotive voice. Amusingly, he still tries to get the occasional Big Word Shout through it, even though every time it's clear it's not going to work. ^* As in, "FUUUUUUUUUCK" comes out as "Fiuiuiuiuahck", which has considerably less weight as a curse word.

Western Animation

• The Batcomputer in Batman: The Animated Series, voiced by Richard "Bull Shannon" Moll, who also voiced Harvey Dent in the series.
• Another aversion is Courage's computer from Courage the Cowardly Dog. He's even a British Deadpan Snarker.
• In a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, the family gets a computerized house, and they of course are freaked out by the default HAL voice, so they take their choice of Matthew Perry, Dennis Miller and Pierce Brosnan.
• Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes featured HERBIE as the Baxter Building's computer equipped with artificial intelligence that allowed him to be comically neurotic.
• Parodied on Invader Zim: Zim's Computer (the AI system for his entire base) often seems to have more common sense than its master, outright telling Zim that his plans will fail, but is never heeded. At other times it becomes whiny when Zim orders it around, or will even refuse to work at all, complaining that Zim doesn't pay him. It's the electronically distorted voice of Jhonen Vasquez.
  Zim: Why is my computer coughing?
• The American Darkstalkers cartoon had Pyron's Computer. A snarky, sarcastic and cynical, talking, glowing and floating metal orb, that rarely does anything besides commenting on his superiors' stupidity.

Real Life

• Assistive Products
  • Blazie Engineering produced a line of notetakers that used the Artic speech chip.
  • All "Vox-Clock" units featured synthetic male voices.
  • Some talking watches use a synthetic male voice to announce the time.
  • The original "Sharp" talking calculator.
• Speech Synthesizers
  • The Double Talk unit only features male voice variants.
  • This is also true with the Accent unit.
• The IBM's supercomputer, Watson. Or, at least its avatar.
• The monorail's announcer in Disney Theme Parks is a chipper male. "Please stand clear of the doors. Por favor, mantengase alejado de las puertas."
• Also the case with Fritz 9, a Chess program designed by Chess Base, -at least in this one, don't know if it has also been implemented in the following versions (I have a newer version (12), but never actually checked the voice system). The program's voice will be a male sarcastic one that will not hesitate to tell you (bad) chess jokes.
• Siri has a male voice in the UK version and is called Daniel.
  • As of iOS 7, the US version also has a male voice.
• Microsoft has released a few male computer voices. Microsoft Mike as part of their SAPI 4 and 5 software, Sam as part of Windows XP and David as part of Windows 8, 8.1 and 10.
• Public buses in Madrid, Spain^note Subway and commuter trains use for that recorded voices use to announce next stops a male voice from the Loquendo program.

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Neutral/Other

Films

• Both male and female voices are heard in Runaway. Louis the Robot Maid speaks with a female voice, while a male voice is used for the building computer at a robot research centre, and there's a brief discussion among the protagonists about the high quality of its voice synthesizer.
• Colossus: The Forbin Project - When Colossus speaks, it is synthesized to sound neutral.
• The Billion Dollar Brain (1967) speaks down telephone lines to the protagonists in the Machine Monotone expected of the era.
  Brain: Is-that-Palmer-private-detective-of-London-speaking-Conform?

Live Action TV

• Kamen Rider Zero-One is back at it again. Naki, an agender human-looking android with an agenda, has a voice that, while not quite feminine, is certainly not a male voice. Their actor later came out as agender themself. This isn't the rule for androids in Zero-One, and Naki seems to be an outlier.
• Holly from Red Dwarf started out as male (with no comment on his gender) but later performed a "computer sex-change" on himself (a Hand Wave to explain Norman Lovett's replacement with Hattie Hayridge, although Lovett would return to the role at the end of Series VII.)
• Solitary is a Reality Show "hosted" by a sentient AI named VAL. In the first season, VAL's voice was androgynous, but from the second season onward, it was clearly female.
• Person of Interest. When communicating Numbers to Harold Finch or John Reese by phone, the Machine strings together voice clips taken from different recorded conversations. It is, however, capable of more fluent verbal expression when necessary. In the final episodes however it chooses to communicate using the voice of Samantha Groves aka Root after her death.

Pinball

• The Allspark in Stern Pinball's Transformers speaks with a heavily-processed electronic voice.
• 3-D Ultra Pinball uses various male and female voices to give game instructions

Radio

• The Foundation Trilogy: Text from the Encyclopedia Galactica is read aloud in a monotone and artificially adjusted to sound more robotic. It's also overlaid with a clicking sound to imply a computer recording.

Video Games

• The VI interfaces in Mass Effect are certainly related: they are holograms that serve as interfaces to allow you to interact with computer systems. The ones in the citadel are Asari (monogendered female-like species). Later both male and female human variations are seen, and even a Prothean one, though due to 50,000 years of wear and tear, that one looks like a irregular sphere rather than resembling an actual Prothean. Then we meet a VI who looks like an actual Prothean in Mass Effect 3.
  • Geth have a neutral voice that also persists when they communicate with organics (as is the case with Legion, for example). They're able to speak fluently, though. Particularly jarring is their original speech pattern as shown in the part of the game where Sheppard goes through historical documents: The original geth (right when they achieve sentience) spoke in a very monotonous voice where each word had exactly one intonation: they basically sound like the first synthetic voice simulators humans have come up with in reality (which is funny considering how far we have come with synthetic voice programs but how far an actual A.I. still is away).
• Metroid
  • Metroid Fusion: The AI in the ship's computer isn't voiced, but in the final confrontation between it and Samus, its Voice Grunting text beeps have a noticeably deeper tone than Samus'. The character is male as well, as Samus finds out during this confrontation.
  • Metroid Dread: ADAM, acting as Samus' ship's computer, is voiced with a male-voiced text-to-speech program.
• Descent: The computer that operates mines. "Self-destruction sequence - activated".
• Halo 3: ODST's Superintendent has a unique variation of this: "he" speaks in a somewhat high-pitched, gender-neutral voice, but in fact only can speak in pre-recorded messages. When trying to prevent a squad of Marines from blowing up a bridge, he urges them to "please respect public property." When he changes his mind, he says "Bridge toll accepted. Have a pleasant trip." In the audio-file side story, he's shown to play certain other sounds - for example, a cane tapping and a seeing-eye dog barking, meaning he can't see what's going on.
• Another Fallout 3 example, Protectrons, who are the lowest-rung bots have a neutral, robotic-y voice. Sometimes it's humorous, sometimes it's just annoying.
• Ikaruga is more likely to fall into this category, it is rather hard to judge whether if the ship's AI is male or female. Then again, this is probably because of the first player is male, while second player is female, and that both ships feature the same AI voice although being two completely different ships.
• Starting with the PS2 games, Armored Core featured the option of changing your AC's computer voice, which the player only ever really heard at the beginning and end of missions. In Armored Core 2 and later games, this was achieved by installing another head (which would cause the player to shell out a few creds just to get rid of the "neuter" voice of the default head unit). In other games, this was changed to an option in the garage menu. In the original Armored Core, the head unit also changed the computer's voice, although one had to experiment to find the different voices; in ''AC2'', this function appeared in the specs.
• Notifications in the first person six-degrees-of-freedom shooter NeonXSZ are read aloud word-by-word by a monotone, gender-ambiguous computer voice.
• Machines: Wired For War has a female voice for mission briefings and announcements, but the machines themselves sound male.
• Starsiege has the creepy Cybrid battle computer. You might call it 'male' if only because it's deeper than the obviously female voice for the humans' computer voice, but it has a rough, inhumanly mechanical undertone in each syllable. Quite fitting for a race of homicidal rogue artificial intelligences.
• In Star Citizen, each of the starship manufacturers installs their own Bitching Betty system that calls out warnings to the pilot.
  • Male Betty users include Aegis Dynamics (a defense contractor) and Roberts Space Industries' cheaper offerings. Aegis uses a stern, human-like voice while cheap RSI ships use a very synthetic voice, to the point where it can be difficult to understand
  • Female Betty user include Origin Jumpworks Gmbh (a BMW expy), Anvil Aerospace (a defense contractor), Drake Interplanetary (a legitimate builder that does not cater to pirates), Musashi Industrial & Starflight Concern (utilitarian Space Trucker manufacturer), and more expensive RSI offerings. Origin uses a soothing slightly synthetic voice, while MISC uses a grating heavily synthesized voice. Drake and Anvil are both variations on somewhat stern, synthetic voices.
• In Phantasy Star Universe and Phantasy Star Online 2, CASTs, a race of intelligent androids, can speak as animatedly as their biological compatriots. Their voices, however, have a very distinct electronic reverb effect added to them.
• In Titanfall, the voices for the systems of the titular mecha can be customized, with options for accent and gender, with each voice having a human name. In Titanfall 2, each Titan chasis instead has their own preset voice, with Ronin, Scorch and Legion having male voices and Ion, Northstar, Tone and Monarch having female voices.

Webcomics

• When Kinesis' Computer talks in Evil Plan'' the use of a computer-like font and emoticon faces leaves it rather gender-neutral.
• While some of the speaking clanks and AIs in Girl Genius have more natural, or more odd, voices for the most part they get special rectangular speech bubbles with small flat rectangles overlaying the edges to indicate their non-organic voices.

Western Animation

• The ship in Futurama had a setting between male and female voices... and apparently personalities.

Real Life

• Microsoft's Sync in Ford vehicles.
• The text to speech device that Stephen Hawking used to communicate sounds nominally male, though it is also clear that it is artificial.
• The Acapela Group has created many male computer voices that are used in screen reading technology for the blind.
• ESpeak has many male variants in its voice selection.
• In Moscow Metro, announcer voice gender serves as a navigational aid. Most of Metro's lines run radial, connecting two edges of the city through the center. So, when the train is moving towards downtown, the voice announcing the stops is male; otherwise, when moving towards the city edge, it's female. The Ring line alternates genders depending on whether the train moves clockwise or counter-clockwise. This is intended to help visually impaired passengers. Few people consciously remember or even know that — but it seems to have an unconscious effect; the folk mnemonic for it is "the boss calls you to work [i.e. downtown], and your wife calls you home [i.e. projects/suburbs]".

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