Experts explain why digital assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa are predominantly female-voiced, suggesting these AI characters are designed to be attentive, submissive, and sometimes even sexy.
You might notice that digital assistants like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa are almost always named after, and voiced by, women. According to several experts, that's no accident.Amazon's Echo Dot, the company's second speaker featuring its voice-controlled assistant, Alexa . Alexa , like many other digital assistant programs on the market, is named after and — at least in most marketing — voiced by a woman. *This documentary originally aired on Oct. 26, 2022.
Today, you can choose a male or female voice for most digital assistants. In February, Apple released a new gender-neutral option, named Quinn. But the trend didn't suddenly appear out of the last decade or so of focus groups. They're also built on a century of seeing computers as women, experts note — and often, women as subservient assistants.The word "computer" has been in use at least since the 1600s. Samuel Johnson's 1755 edition of the English Dictionary defines the word as "a reckoner or accountant."
Edward Pickering and a group of the computers he hired are seen in a 1913 photo in front of the Harvard College University. The women were often collectively known as Pickering's Harem. "Pickering bragged … he was paying them as little as he could get away with," said Grier. In the 1950s, that involved trying to reduce fears that automation was threatening to make jobs — from industrial to office work — obsolete.
After initial fears that it would render the other women's jobs obsolete, EMMY eventually becomes a trusted member of the team. "If we think about it, we did not really interact with artificial intelligence or anything that seemed like it was artificial intelligence until we started seeing these smart assistants come along," said Guzman.It's no wonder that if you asked the original 2011 Siri if it knew HAL, it would respond: "I'd rather not talk about HAL.
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