I think there's probably quite likely that the desired position for a chatbot on the conformity-contrarian axis is quite different from country to country.
The appropriate tone for a culture seems to be something that US companies are quite poor at. It really surprised me that after many many years of AI in fiction developing a de facto standard baseline of tone that they decided to start out with 'overly familiar cheerful'
I have wondered if the horrific Tiktok voice came from Chinese developers setting it to represent how Americans sound to them. Maybe it goes in both ways.
The appropriate tone for a culture seems to be something that US companies are quite poor at. It really surprised me that after many many years of AI in fiction developing a de facto standard baseline of tone that they decided to start out with 'overly familiar cheerful'
I have wondered if the horrific Tiktok voice came from Chinese developers setting it to represent how Americans sound to them. Maybe it goes in both ways.