Ever noticed how all the AI assistants sound female?
Alexa, Siri, Google, and Microsoft’s Cortana are all voiced by women by default, and that’s deliberate.
Research by tech companies developing these AI assistants found that people hear female-sounding voices as more polite and agreeable than male voices.
But given that you use these AIs by giving them instructions them to perform tasks for you, it can starts to feel a bit weird ordering all these digital women around.
And it can reinforce subconscious ideas around how women should be helpful and obedient, even if you don’t think you think like that.
But because we live in a glorious age where our understanding of gender goes beyond the old-fashioned binary, we now have a genderless option.
Meet Q:
Q was developed by recording 22 trans and non-binary people’s voices and then digitally manipulating it slightly to sound more gender neutral.
A listening test showed that about half of about 4500 people who heard it couldn’t pick what gender the voice was or said it was neutral, and the rest were evenly split between thinking it was male and female.
“Naming a home assistant Alexa, which sounds female, can be problematic for some people, because it reinforces this stereotype that females assist and support people in tasks,” said Julie Carpenter, one of the researchers involved in Project Q.
“There is no reason that a voice has to be gendered.”
Q isn’t about to be an option on your Alexa or Siri any time soon.
But it could help put pressure on tech companies to think about how daily interactions with a gendered voice affect the way we perceive the real people and stereotypes around us – and having a truly gender-free voice as a default could help normalise non-binary thinking for those people who still kinda need to put everyone in a box.