Who are you talking to? Considerations on designing gender ambiguous voice user interfaces.

Abstract

With the widespread availability of Voice Assistants in smart devices, the usage of Voice User Interfaces has highly increased in the recent years. Although the anthropomorphized Voice Assistants present in these systems can aid users in many tasks, it also activates harmful gender bias and stereotypes. Since the usage of Gender Ambiguous voice agents in these interfaces is considered as solution for mitigating these gender effects, this paper analyzed different studies in the field of Voice User Interface design, while proposing a theoretical framework to design gender ambiguous voice agents, considering the type of recording, method of sound manipulation, method of evaluation for gender identification and contextual characteristics.