![]() ![]() Strengers is a co-author of “The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot.” The book examines technologies that perform traditionally feminized roles, including housekeeping robots like the Roomba, caregiving robots like the humanoid Pepper or Paro seal, sex robots and, of course, the multitasking, ever-ready voice assistants.ĭr. ![]() “The work that these devices are intended to do” - making appointments, watching the oven timer, updating the shopping list - “all of those kinds of areas are gendered,” said Yolande Strengers, an associate professor of digital technology and society at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.ĭr. What does it mean for humans that we take for granted that the disembodied voices we boss around at home are female? How does the presence of these feminized voice assistants affect the dynamics between the actual women and men who use them? Amazon and its competitors in the digital assistant market may deny it, but design and marketing have led to AI that seems undeniably, well, feminine. If you verbally harass or abuse Alexa, as the journalist Leah Fessler discovered in 2017, Alexa will feign ignorance or demurely deflect. Alexa is subservient and eager to please. “I’m an AI.”Īlexa is sold with a default female-sounding voice and has a female-sounding name. “I’m not a woman or a man,” Alexa says sweetly when asked to define its gender. Her husband hates it.ĭepicting Alexa as a masculine presence is funny because - at least according to Amazon’s official line - the cloud-based voice service has no gender at all. ![]() Instead of the disembodied female voice that comes standard in the device, requests for shopping list updates, measurement conversions and adjustments to the home lighting and sprinkler systems are fulfilled by the smoldering star, in person - voice, eyes, abs and all. In an Amazon ad that aired during the Super Bowl on Sunday, a woman admiring the spherical contours of the company’s Echo speaker reimagines her Alexa voice assistant as the actor Michael B. ![]()
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