Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Why All Boats are a “She”

Arguably, the most widely used form of AI today are Digital Voice Agents (DVAs). It is estimated that more than half of all Americans use DVAs, primarily via smartphones but also via personal computers and home speakers (Pew Research Center, 2017). All four of the leading DVAs (Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google Assistant) use strong cues of human-like qualities — gender, voice, name (except Google Assistant) and personality.

By default in most (but not all) markets they are feminine, and identified by most users as such. If you’re over the age of 24, you haven’t really stopped to wonder why that is, according to a 2018 LivePerson study.

Siri, the first mass market and today’s most widely used digital agent, has been available on iPhones since 2011, and for almost a decade users have gotten used to many helpful responses just by saying “Hey, Siri.” A fact that may surprise American iPhone owners is that Siri is, and has always been, a male voice by default in the U.K., France, and Germany(2). Today, for many of the language settings…