"From the beginning, those voices were highly regulated and controlled so as not to provoke certain outrage..."

"... as if it were a given that a woman virtually freed of her uterus and visual sexual signifiers would obviously pose some considerable threat. Consider the guidelines of a pamphlet for operators published by the Chicago Telephone Company in the early 20th century and called 'First Lessons in Telephone Operating.' The book was used to train some of the first generations of disembodied female voices — belonging to women who were given entree into a new line of work only because the young men who preceded them found the job so annoying that they were, in fact, uncontrollably rude. 'The training of the voice to become soft, low, melodious and to carry well is the most difficult lesson an operator has to learn,' the guide reads.... The voice of novel technological communication has been, almost from the beginning, a female voice, which is to say the voice of a helper, a perfect helper, pleasant, unflappable, immune to insults, come-ons and bossiness. It’s a short path from the telephone operator to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, both forever placating, always even-keeled, impervious...."

Writes Susan Dominus, in "Has the Internet Changed How Women Sound? Technology’s many automated female voices are nothing if not helpful" (NYT).