In honour of Women's Month this August, it is worth looking at why most chatbots are designed as females - and also how this is changing, writes Ebrahim Dinat, COO of Ocular Technologies.
Perhaps the most famous of these is Siri, the iPhone 4S feminine computerised personal assistant - who even had a guest role in a television episode of the Big Bang Theory.
A CNN article, "Why computer voices are mostly female", puts it down to both biology and history. Stating: "One answer may lie in biology. Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women's voices more pleasing than men's. 'It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,' said Stanford University professor Clifford Nass, author of 'The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships'. 'It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.'
"Another answer lies in history. According to some sources, the use of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women's voices were employed in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots. And telephone operators have traditionally been female, making people accustomed to getting assistance from a disembodied woman's voice."
However, as more chatbots are being developed, there is a trend to move away from gender - and so also stereotypes and circumnavigate cultural bias. This means that the goal is to develop a gender-neutral bot - after all, it is still to be established what pronoun to use for a bot: he, she or it?
Phys.org in a piece, "Designing a chatbot: male, female or gender neutral?" notes: "From Apple's Siri to Amazon's Alexa, a majority of the world's most popular virtual assistants have female personas. But that's starting to change as a growing number of consumers ? and companies ? turn to digital assistants. Some developers are going against the grain, creating chatbots and messaging apps that no longer conform to one gender and challenging a tradition of female digital assistants that some say display submissive personalities."
Making virtual assistants female by default can be bad for business and perpetuate stereotypes, these chatbot developers say, so they're offering more options to consumers.
"A bot can be male or female, but I think it doesn't need to be submissive...," said Dror Oren, co-founder and vice president of product at Kasisto. "It can be a woman and have a smart, authoritative approach. A lot of bots are women, but they show behaviour which is not necessarily what I would like to see when I think about my daughters."
Kasisto is a New York start-up that developed banking chatbot MyKAI. Should you ask MyKAI if it's male or female, it responds: "As a bot, I'm not a human. But I learn. That's machine learning."
Whether the voice sounds male, female or neutral, what does become clear is that technology has the power to reshape stereotypical roles and empower genders to create a new normal where science, innovation, art, life, biology, finance and everything in between is equally assigned. Perhaps the lack of a chatbot pronoun is already the first step in the progression of gender equality.
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