Virtual assistants need an update
Students aren’t strangers to setting reminders for themselves to stop procrastinating and actually getting work done. These reminders usually come with the help from voice assistants on most mobile devices. Virtually, every person on campus has a smartphone, and even if they don’t explicitly use it regularly, they all have some sort of virtual assistant.
Really, mine is how I remember to do everything. That’s where I get my information from. That’s how I text my mom, among the most important things a person can do. It’s no wonder the Oscar-winning movie “Her” struck such a chord.
With these assistants in virtually every computing device on the market, there’s a very obvious trend with the naming conventions. Siri, Cortana and Alexa, the most popular voice assistants from Apple, Windows and Amazon respectively, are all feminine names. While the assistant living in Google Home and Android phones doesn’t have a name, it still has a feminine voice. These ladies probably don’t realize how important they are.
In more ways than one, these intimate computer programs are impressive. Beyond their ability to do all the things previously mentioned, voice assistants are remarkably personable. They tell jokes and they even learn about individual users and their personal preferences.
When I was a student at the School of Mines, I purposefully talked to Siri just to hear a woman’s voice. Thankfully, I did not end up like Joaquin Phoenix in “Her.” These voices can be wonderful, but they don’t reflect the best of us.
As the term “virtual assistant” would suggest, the idea of these programs is to have a personal assistant wherever one goes. Historically, the role of the secretary is reserved for women. From personal experience, I’ve never seen a personal assistant in person that wasn’t a woman. Maybe I don’t get out very often, but the assumption still exists, living on in technology.
There’s nothing wrong with a woman occupying this role, but it does say something about people that their minds instantly default to a female voice to help out. Of course, Silicon Valley has long been dominated by men. This heavy skew probably contributes to the issue, and, speaking from experience, lonely computer nerds do sometimes need to hear a woman’s voice. The major point here is the implication of inherent sexism everybody has and how it’s perpetuated in most aspects of daily life.
To be fair, Siri does come in a male variety, but the vast majority of voice assistants are feminine. This is a sort of subservience. Not only are they filling a role that implies being lower than the user so they can take care of small tasks, they’re literally robots, less than human and even beyond the need of thanks.
One could argue this isn’t really a problem and the author is just making a stink over nothing. Maybe that’s true, but society needs to take a step back and examine why everybody chooses to talk to these imaginary women and not imaginary men.
