Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and the Command of Women’s Voices
Who are virtual assistants for, and how do we relate to them?
I tend to avoid using digital assistants. Maybe it’s my technophobic tendencies, a hatred of having my music interrupted by other sounds from my phone, how weird I feel about digital assistants all being female, or my discomfort with having what feels like a servant. Mostly, it’s because I have been a real, analog assistant to an imperious old man. I was a chirpy female voice parsing and assenting to my boss, popping into his office first thing in the workday with a stack of correspondence printed out, compiling his action items into to-do lists, taking dictation for memos and emails.
I quickly realized that my job was unnecessary. My 90-something boss could handle his own correspondence and administrative work — often better than a lackadaisical, distracted 23-year-old could. The only real purpose I served was providing my boss with the experience of having an assistant.
My Google Assistant speaks to me like I might speak to my boss, or my boss’s boss’s boss. I set it to my native French — a language that makes hierarchies more apparent — and found that the assistant refused to address me with the familiar tu, saying, “I was always taught to say vous.” A human who says this is indicating that…
