I was hoping to find a voice like Microsoft's "Guy" (a name, not referring to the gender) or Google Assistant's "Pink". An unambiguously white, masculine, American "radio voice" or "audiobook narrator" voice.
ChatGPT describes this as "A rich, deep, and smooth tone that is pleasant to listen to for extended periods. This often comes from good control over pitch and timbre, creating a voice that resonates well."
If you watch youtube, voices in this theme are the Pirate Software guy, and the voice of The Infographics show.
There are similar voices for every gender, race, and nationality. As an American, Morgan Freeman comes to mind as a comfy black, masculine narrator voice.
All this is to lead up to my point that companies engage in a meticulous science when deciding who should voice roles, and especially when the product itself is literally just a synthetic voice and they near limitless capacity to shape it.
With that in mind, here are the voices that OpenAI wants us to hear:
Breeze: ambiguous gender, white, feminine
Juniper: female, black
Maple: female, white
Spruce: male, black, masculine
Arbor: male, Australian, masculine
Sol: female, white
Ember: male, black, less masculine
Cove: male, Sal Khan, less masculine
Vale: female, British
The only one that could be considered a narrator/radio voice is unambiguously black (great if that's your preference). It just seems weird that they would intentionally exclude a masculine white male, and that sucks because those are always my preferred voices when I'm looking for audiobooks or choosing a computer voice. It sucks in particular because OpenAI is not staffed by dumb people—this exclusion was intentional, and that's obnoxious.
My last note on the Advanced Voice feature is that it makes my phone HOT within a few seconds, which will limit it's usefulness on sunny days when I need hands-free use the most while the phone is mounted to my dash. This is when the device is already liable to overheat (display forced to dim, lagging due to shutting down CPU cores, and in the worst case the phone shutting off and refusing to work until it gets cooler).