Microsoft has Cortana, Amazon has Alexa, and Google has … well, Google Assistant. That last name doesn’t give it away, but get it talking and the common link between all three AI assistants is revealed: they are all supposed to be women.
Providing assistance has long been considered a woman’s role, whether virtual or physical, fictional or real. The robots that men voice, meanwhile, tend to be in positions of power – often dangerously so. Think Hal 9000, or the Terminator: when a robot needs to be scary, it sounds like a man.
Patriarchy tells us that women serve, while men order, and technology firms seem content to play into stereotypes, rather than risk the potentially jarring results of challenging them. Apple’s Siri speaks with a male voice in some territories (including the UK), and a female voice in others. But as the feminist academic Helen Hester has shown, when early assistants such as Apple’s 1987 “Knowledge Navigator” were given male personas, they tended to be seen as “a research assistant, an academic librarian and an information manager, rather than as a personal secretary”.
Just switching in a man’s voice, then, might not be enough to throw out the association of administrative work with women. Maybe the question is, when an Amazon Echo has no more a sense of gender identity than a lawnmower, why are we gendering robots at all?
EqualAI, an initiative dedicated to correcting gender bias in AI, has backed the creation of Q, what it says is the first genderless voice. By blending the voices of five non-binary speakers and pitch-shifting that recording to 153Hz – a frequency midway between the tones commonly perceived as male and female – and testing the results on an audience of thousands before refining further, they have created a ready-to-use library with which to voice not just digital assistants, but metro stations, games and more.
Q will be made available on 11 March. But whether technology firms will think to resist the easy association of femininity with subservience, in favour of something more progressive – and more true to robots’ non-human nature – remains to be seen.
• This article was amended on 7 March 2019 to clarify that while EqualAI supported the creation of Q, it did not create or fund it.
