The Sound of Silence: What We’re Not Saying About Siri and Her AI Gal Pals

In fact, a spokesman for Microsoft explained to PC Magazine that helper traits are at the core of its choice to create Cortana with a female voice. In making this decision, Microsoft conducted gender research and found that people associate helpfulness, trustworthiness, and supportiveness with women’s voices, not men’s.

The goal for voice-assistant creators such as Microsoft seems to be for people to forget that they’re speaking with a nonhuman entity. In contrast, when UX designers create voices they intend to be transparently robotic, they audition male voice actors, not females.

Take IBM’s Watson for example. When IBM gave Watson a female persona, users didn’t know it was a computer at all. They ostensibly gave Watson a male voice to eliminate this confusion. But is it possible that Watson’s male voice is meant subtly to say leader and confident—referring to what is arguably the world’s smartest artificial intelligence (AI) technology to date—rather than helper or supportive?

If you’re skeptical about that idea, look at how listeners reacted to female producers on “This American Life,” whose speech patterns exhibited vocal fry—the adoption of a low, raspy tone, especially at the end of sentences. Host Ira Glass commented that the letters the program received after putting the producers on air were some of the angriest he’d seen. He’s never been criticized for his low, raspy voice in the way his female peers have been. The actual objection seems to be that the women’s voices sound assertive and masculine at their lower register, using more gravelly tones.

Our tendency toward using female-sounding voice assistants and Glass’s observations about vocal fry really demonstrate two sides of the same coin: prejudice against women and their voices.

Intersectionality and Unconscious Bias

Our society’s gender bias stems from women historically being limited to supportive careers. Today, bias against women shows up not only in the voices of our digital assistants, but also all over the media and technology industries.

Just twenty-nine percent of the top films of 2016 featured female protagonists—roughly half the number that made males the #1 stars. Even video games overwhelmingly cast female characters as assistants rather than featured performers. Generation after generation, these stereotypes have become deeply ingrained in our society.

The technology sector suffers from a particularly virulent strain of gender bias. Sixty percent of women working in Silicon Valley have experienced unwanted sexual advances, and two-thirds say they’ve been excluded from socializing and networking events.

This sort of sexism stands in stark relief to the role of a UX designer. Curating the user’s experience requires empathy. Without it, a designer can’t understand the context in which a user experiences a product or service. A UX designer who doesn’t understand the user’s context risks designing their personal biases into the user’s experience, furthering the cycle of prejudice against women. Recognizing the fact that women in the media and technology industries—and, specifically, voice assistants—are not operating on an even playing field is the first step toward leveling that field.

Why do American companies create virtual assistants that sound like women? The truth lies somewhere in the gray areas of cultural stereotypes, sexism, and prejudice. Do UX designers have the responsibility to take the risk of encouraging users to buck their subconscious beliefs? Is making a bold statement worth manipulating a technology’s user experience? These are questions that Siri can’t answer. But we—as UX designers, consumers, and the members of an unequal society—must.