The femininization of AI-powered voice assistants: Personification, anthropomorphism and discourse ideologies

Abstract

Intelligent Voice Assistants (IVAs), such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Assistant, have been mainstreamed as female by default, through voices, avatars, colour palette, and conversational cues. Even though tech companies tend to justify this systematic feminization on customers’ preferences, the ingrained gender biases have been raising concerns about the normalization of gendered, abusive, and toxic discourse practices.

In this paper, a multimodal critical discourse approach, combined with feminist philosophy, and notions of ‘digital domesticity’ will be applied to analyse examples of IVA’s coded responses, as well as personification and anthropomorphic conversational cues. The analysis aims to uncover the companies’ hidden ideologies as they emerge from coded (i.e., pre-established) conversational practices (i.e., what IVAs are expected to say to engage users) in response to users’ prompts that gender, sexualize, and ultimately harass IVAs – a practice that hard-wires women and subservience. The paper seeks to advance understanding of the intersection of design interface of IVAs with reference to the ideological gendering of IVAs, actively pursued by companies to increase user engagement.