Goodbye, Caroline: Why We’re Renaming Our Product
Those of you following us from the beginning will know Caroline very well. In the earliest days of the company, when I was on my own, I was given advice from a friend and brilliant former colleague: give the bot a human name to make it more approachable. It was an off the cuff comment, but I knew immediately that her logic was right — the cold tech needed some warmth.
Searching for a punny name that would be memorable, I settled on Caroline. Caroline, depicted with a robot’s face, a bob of pink hair and a heart on her chest, served as a wonderful focal point for the company. She was clearly a bot, yet people connected with her. The persona of Caroline, and her power to gather a village of support around caregivers, made for a powerful, award winning story.
Months later, however, as our incredible new product lead and I began to tread into real product discussions, it became clear — Caroline needed to go. There were two main reasons, the second of which is the main impetus for both the change and this article:
Technical — A Problem with the Name
This is a topic I hope our product lead will write more about, but here’s the basic version. Building a conversational agent that works as intended and that people latch onto is already a tough task. It needs to speak to you in a natural way, a big part of which is knowing your name. We saw it right away — eventually someone named “Caroline” will join the platform, and it could cause a problem. Something simple, like “Can Caroline help me with my laundry” suddenly becomes needlessly complex, as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) tries to determine if you are referring to it, or to your friend from high school. Why give the tech yet another challenge? Caroline, as a name, was gone.
Social — A Problem with the Character
There’s an increasing movement for gender neutrality in AI. I wasn’t aware of this when I founded the company, but, frankly, with over 75% of caregivers identifying as female, I’m ashamed for not thinking more about this up front. Searching for “Gender Neutrality AI” will give you more than enough to read, but for a deep dive, please consider digging into the UNESCO paper “I’d Blush If I Could”, named for the response Apple’s assistant Siri used to give to millions of users who lobbed obscenities at her, such as “Siri, you’re a bi***”. In particular, Think Piece 2, beginning on page 85, is relevant to this topic.
Many before me have given AI entities female personas, most famously Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Others have simply implied femininity — the default Google assistant and even the computer from Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek have distinctly female voices, though they are not referred to as female. The simple act of making AI female is not the issue — in fact, in many cases, it may be both appropriate and preferable. For example, if a bot was designed to educate people about the history of women’s rights, I would argue that women own that story, and should be the ones to tell it. Where assigning gender becomes problematic is when the tech is designed to be subjugated, or submissive. By their very nature, digital assistants and other bots must be designed this way. So, by defaulting them all to female personas, we are reinforcing the problematic biases that women serve men, and that they will absorb any level of vitriol and social violence directed at them.
In creating Caroline, I gave the bot a female, humanoid persona in an effort to warm up what would be an otherwise cold, digital entity. It worked, but that doesn’t make it right, and we can do better. Frankly, I was wrapped up in the idea of the product, and in understanding the dynamics of caregiving. I had unintentionally made a crude mistake. By creating a female character that would be subservient, we would be reinforcing a dated narrative that is part of the problem we are trying to overcome: the idea that care is a woman’s job by default. If we’re going to cope with increased survival, from the exploding elderly population down to children who now survive previously fatal cancers, we need to realize that care is everyone’s job.
So, while we loved Caroline and everything that she stood for, we know that her new place is a reminder to be aware of the story we choose to tell, and its consequences. We’ll celebrate Caroline, but, thankfully, we will not push her into servitude when we launch. We’re really excited to introduce the new face of the company.
