Talk like a lady, think like a LAN.

If you're one of the 128 million Americans who starts their day with a weather forecast from a smart device, the first voice you likely hear every morning is the "reassuring and trustworthy" intonation of a woman who does not actually exist.

92.4% of the US marketshare for A.I.-enabled voice assistants is held by just four chrome companions: Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, & the Google Assistant, all of which are programmed to respond to queries with the voice of a nondescript female.

While today's smartphone assistants do offer an array of alternate voices aside from the Universal Female (ranging from Universal Male to Samuel L. Jackson), a 34.43% majority of users still see our familiar Jane three-point-Doe as the crowd favorite.

But the way people speak to their digital assistants, sometimes with abusive, insulting or sexualized language towards women, followed by tolerant and passive responses from the A.I., further reinforce the stereotype of the "compliant” women.

This week, Wonder gives voice to the issue of:

"Siri, why did humans attach gender to computers in the first place?"

Source: Martech.org — Source: *Martech.org*

Domo Arigato, Miss Roboto 🤖

Ever had one of those fleeting moments where you thought a computer was your friend?

That's because robots, A.I., chatbots, and other forms of intelligent technology are literally designed to dupe us; a concept known as Humanization:

Social– Adding language, personality, empathy, emotion, name, intention, conversation, or nonverbal behavior to a machine or A.I.
Ethical – Adding values or morals to a machine or A.I.
Spiritual – Adding tradition, culture, or religion to a machine or A.I.'s personality.
Physical – Giving a machine or A.I. a human-like appearance, gender, race, etc.

So why should we care? For starters, the Big Four voice assistants definitely do.

These companies pour millions into personality teams; R&D taskforces responsible to create an entire persona for your little pocket pundit complete with likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams, and even detailed backstories.

E.g. Cortana likes waffles and the Google Assistant prefers fantasy books over other genres.

As a result, these personality teams (mostly built by men due to the gender imbalance of skills in the technology sector) concluded female bots are perceived to have more positive human qualities, such as warmth, experience, and emotion, than male bots, and this greater humanness leads consumers to prefer female artificial intelligence.

How a woman’s place became your phone 📱

While the gendering of our voice technologies may appear as a consequence of the Smartphone Era, female voice recordings date back to 1878, when Emma Nutt became the first woman to be a telephone operator.

In fact, Nutt became the blueprint for how (and who) we interact with voice assistants today.

Companies all across America were so keen to emulate her appeal, that by the turn of the century, every single telephone operator role in America was filled by a woman.

Due to this standard gender-based role transition, hundreds of years worth of female voice recordings could be leveraged to develop new modes of voice automation, reinforcing gender biases towards women as "obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers, available at the touch of a button" in the process:

When Google launched Google Assistant in 2016, it intended to use a female voice and a male voice; however, “there was a historical bias in its text to speech systems, which had been trained primarily on female voices.”
(Sexual) harassment of voice assistants is not uncommon either. Microsoft's Cortana revealed that "a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries’ probed the assistant’s sex life."
Robin Labs, a developer of virtual assistants for logistic companies, reported that at least "5% of interactions were unambiguously sexually explicit."

Telephone operators sitting in front of a long switchboard at the Cortland Exchange in New York City around the turn of the century. Source: Getty Images — *Telephone operators sitting in front of a long switchboard at the Cortland Exchange in New York City around the turn of the century.*
*Source:* Getty Images

For more insight into the ethics and dangers of gendering robots or A.I., and why mechanical robots used for physical tasks are traditionally male-gendered, check out the report below:

View Research Here

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