Apple has quietly confirmed that the much-anticipated rollout of its iOS 15.4 update is coming sometime next week. It also includes 37 new emoji, including a pregnant man, a motorcycle tyre, a slide, a disco ball, a troll with a club, coral, kidney beans and a low battery. There's also a new'gender neutral' voice for its smart assistant Siri, called Quinn, recorded by a member of the LGBTQ community. Apple's confirmation follows the unveiling of new products on Tuesday, including the third generation phone in its'budget' iPhone SE line, starting at £419 ($429). Since the start of the pandemic, getting Face ID to automatically recognise our face to unlock our iPhones has been a bugbear as we've had masks over our faces.

Apple has developed a new Siri voice, now available in the beta versions of its iOS 15.4 software, that doesn't sound obviously male or female. The decision to introduce a gender-neutral voice is one that sees the tech giant taking yet another step away from the criticism that, historically, digital assistants have reinforced unfair gender stereotypes. Over the years, industry observers and experts argued how the creation of voice assistants with female-sounding names -- like Alexa, Siri and Cortana -- which also speak with female-sounding voices, implied that women should be the ones to do your bidding at any time and even take your abuse. A U.N. study additionally called out the female voiced-assistants and their submissive and sometimes even flirty and coy styles. More problematically, the decision to make so many of the virtual assistants female by default was likely driven by a lack of diversity in the teams responsible for building our everyday technology.

For as long as Apple has offered Siri, the digital assistant has defaulted to a female voice in North America. With the latest iOS 14.5 beta, TechCrunch reports Apple is introducing two English-speaking voices for Siri and making it so that you can pick the voice you like best when setting up an iOS or HomePod device. "We're excited to introduce two new Siri voices for English speakers and the option for Siri users to select the voice they want when they set up their device," Apple told the publication. "This is a continuation of Apple's long-standing commitment to diversity and inclusion, and products and services that are designed to better reflect the diversity of the world we live in." Apple recruited new talent for the two voices and then ran them through its Neural text to speech engine.