One of the comments is What's with the anthropomorphism? It's weird that you keep calling a piece of software a "she". and I have to say I fully agree: it made the entire article just weird to read?
What it boils down to is that we will interact with interactive characters as though they were people (and hence with gender, at least in the linguistic sense). It wouldn't make sense to consider a page of search engine results a character, or the alarm screen of your phone. But when software is programmed to respond to general input... well for one thing the authors will surely script some responses (as is the case with Siri and Cortana). And something potentially recognisable as a form of personality would probably just fall out of the quirks of the system. We can quibble over whether (linguistic) gender has meaning here but the software is well within the bounds of anthropomorphism.
It would be fine to follow Greg Egan's usage with ve and vir for virtual personalities. Or to agree that software is a neuter gender even if it has a soft voice and refers to itself as female. But you're not going to convince people that (even quite limited software) with character and a name shouldn't be anthropomorphised.
I realize that would be the case for English speakers... In Spanish doesn't sound that weird because nouns have genres anyway. For instance, in Latin America a computer is a "she"