If you're in the study of voice-activated features or curious why people generally find women voices more pleasing than men's then I suggest you read this article at cnn.com. Research on computerized voices suggests that female preference starts as early as the womb and the practice goes back to World War II, when women voices were employed in airplane cockpits. On the other hand, exceptions do exist! BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on its 5 Series cars in the late 1990s after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman. For instance Apple's Siri, the iPhone 4S's voice, grew from a five-year research project that was funded by military agency DARPA and led by SRI International, a Bay Area research institute.
Read the full news item here: