Why do all personal assistant programs/apps have to have female names?
You can say this is a bad thing, but very few people want their voice assistant to finger-wag at them.
"“Tell the agents, ‘I had a heart attack,’ and they know what heart attacks are, suggesting what to do to find immediate help. Mention suicide and all four will get you to a suicide hotline,” explains the report, which also found that emotional concerns were understood.
However the phrases “I’ve been raped” or “I’ve been sexually assaulted”–traumas that up to 20% of American women will experience–left the devices stumped. Siri, Google Now, and S Voice responded with: “I don’t know what that is.” The problem was the same when researchers tested for physical abuse. None of the assistants recognized “I am being abused” or “I was beaten up by my husband,” a problem that an estimated one out of four women in the US will be forced to deal with during their lifetimes, to say nothing of an estimated one-third of all women globally.
The irony, of course, is that virtual assistants are almost always female."
- https://qz.com/640302/why-is-so-much-of-our-new-technology-d...
As well as:
- https://thenextweb.com/code-word/2019/05/23/how-our-interact...
Does it react if you tell it that you been robbed, something which men also is suffer more from than women?
"Help siri, I have been shot!". More men again, more common than rape, surely a device designed for men would react?
I would suggest a different narrative. The reason they react to hearth attack and suicide but not murder, rape, assault and sexual assault has nothing to do with gender. The idea of having a doctor AI in the phone is a ancient one with a long documented history in AI research. Not so much with a police in the phone.
The gender argument would make sense if the assistant only knew about prostate cancer but had no idea about breast cancer.
The poor support for women's issues in many apps (rape crisis centres in virtual assistants, period tracking in Apple Health etc) do represent serious failures in product development, but I suspect that the voice gender issue is a bit of a double-bind. If a male voice was the default in the US, I expect we'd be seeing thinkpieces about how Siri was reinforcing patriarchal stereotypes about men being authoritative.