Why do AI assistants almost always have female voices?

Meet the long-overdue Ziggy everyone…

Amazon has introduced a new ‘masculine’ sounding voice, with the wake up word ‘Ziggy.’ The name is presumably inspired by Amazon’s continued use of “A to Z” style branding. You can listen to the new voice here. Despite the change, ‘Alexa’ remains the voice assistant’s default trigger word.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered voice assistants have long drawn criticism for using female voices by default. According to a 2019 study by UNESCO voice assistants with female voices are perpetuating harmful gender biases. “Companies like Apple and Amazon, staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams, have built AI systems that cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch-me-if-you-can flirtation,” the report by UNESCO explained.

“Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are… docile helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’. The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility.”

At the moment women make up just 12% of AI researchers. These female helpers are portrayed as “obliging and eager to please”, reinforcing the idea that women are “subservient”, it found.

On the subject of men building digital assistants programmed with female voices Kathleen Richardson, the author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines, told The Atlantic that “I think that probably reflects what some men think about women—that they’re not fully human beings,”

Following backlash Apple, Samsung, and Google were quick to add male-sounding voices to their voice assistants. Apple was the first to announce that Siri will no longer default to a female voice and users will choose a voice during the first run.

To get the new Amazon Alexa voice users need to say “Alexa, change your voice” and the digital assistant will switch genders. Users will also have the option to change the voice by heading into the Settings menu of the Alexa app. At the moment ‘Ziggy’ only works in the US.