{"id":11610,"date":"2019-03-07T14:38:35","date_gmt":"2019-03-07T14:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocialelement.agency\/us\/?p=11610"},"modified":"2019-03-07T14:40:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-07T14:40:11","slug":"digital-virtual-assistants-gender-bias-and-why-it-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocialelement.agency\/us\/digital-virtual-assistants-gender-bias-and-why-it-matters","title":{"rendered":"Digital virtual assistants, gender bias, and why it matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
Most digital virtual assistants are female by default (Siri, Alexa, Cortana). According to Amazon, that\u2019s because when it tested various voices before launching Alexa, customers and internal audiences preferred a female voice. The same is true of Cortana, who although technically genderless, also has a female voice (and name). Microsoft told <\/span>PC Magazine<\/span><\/a> in 2018 this was because a female voice was seen as more \u2018helpful, supportive, trustworthy.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Helpful, supportive. Add nurturing to that, and you\u2019d have a hat-trick of stereotypical female attributes. <\/span><\/p>\n Does it matter? I think so. In a fascinating article for the New Yorker, chatbot designer Jacqueline Feldman explained why she created banking chatbot Kai to be genderless: <\/span>\u201cBy creating interactions that encourage consumers to understand the objects that serve them as women, technologists abet the prejudice by which women are considered objects.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Some virtual assistants do now have an option for a male voice (Apple was the first to do this in 2013). I\u2019d love to know how many people bother to change it. Mostly they remain female. The pronouns we use for digital virtual assistants are telling. Most people I know call Alexa \u2018she\u2019 rather than \u2018it\u2019. We all know she\u2019s a robot, but we give her human attributes. What does that say, then, we we start yelling at her for playing the wrong music, or calling her stupid when she can\u2019t understand us? Do we let our children talk to her that way, and what impact does that have on how they respond to other female voices in the house? <\/span><\/p>\n Google, Amazon and Apple have all put considerable time and money into creating voices for their assistants that are as human as possible. People respond better to them. And they respond with emotion. Research by <\/span>Moridis and Economides<\/span><\/a> in 2012 showed that we mirror emotion, even from a robot. The more human a bot appears, the more we relate to it with human emotions. <\/span><\/p>\n