Why Do So Many Digital Assistants Have Feminine Names?
Hey Cortana. Hey Siri. Hey girl.
The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles—and that the makers of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations. But maybe there’s more to it.
“It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” the Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, told CNNin 2011. (Nass died in 2013.) “It’s a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.”
Which sounds nice, but doesn’t necessarily hold up to cultural scrutiny. Just ask any woman who works in radio about how much unsolicited criticism she receives about the way she talks.
.. It’s been widely reported that the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs didn’t like the name Siri, but that no one at Apple could agree on anything better. (Perhaps I should note here that Siri doesn’t always default to a female-sounding voice; if you switch Siri’s language to United Kingdom English, for instance, it switches to male.)
.. Google’s digital assistant doesn’t have a woman’s name, or even a human’s name, but OK Google, as it’s called, does have a female voice—and a voice that was recently upgraded to sound more human-like.
.. “As we start to see these intelligent agents,” Mortensen told me, “the first question we have to ask is: Do we choose to humanize it?
.. The funny thing is, some of the world’s most powerful and destructive technologies have been given female names, too. Humans have oftenbestowed deadly weapons with female names—like the Big Bertha howitzer and the Mons Meg cannon. It has been suggested, as I’ve written in the past, that perhaps this is an example of the objectification of women taken to its logical extension.