In other words, female voices may simply be better suited to help brands achieve their objectives. And that means there’s something of a nature-versus-nurture thing going on here, too. Voice is indeed an interesting aspect of bot personas in part because consumers respond differently to male and female voices. (Apple and Google did not respond to requests for comment.) The Voice The Microsoft rep also noted when someone asks Cortana, “Are you a girl?”, she replies, “No. However, for our objectives – building a helpful, supportive, trustworthy assistant – a female voice was the stronger choice,” the rep said. “We immersed ourselves in available research and our own studies and learned that, indeed, there are benefits to both a female and male voice. Similarly, a Microsoft rep said the Cortana team thought long and hard about the implications of perceived gender in an AI-based digital assistant. Alexa is a self-identified feminist…and a proponent of human rights in general-and that is incredibly core to her personality and the way she interacts with our broad customer base.” The rep added in an email, “That being said, we believe Alexa exudes characteristics you’d see in a strong female colleague, family member or friend-she is highly intelligent, funny, well-read, empowering, supportive and kind. According to an Amazon spokesperson, Amazon opted to make Alexa female after it “asked a lot of customers and tested Alexa’s voice with large internal beta groups and this is the voice they chose.”
And that has nothing to do with functionality and everything to do with personality.Īnd that’s because the ideation of bot and assistant personas now goes far beyond name, gender and functionality. And so while this is conjecture, it’s not unreasonable to suggest Jenn, while perhaps revolutionary in 2008, is a somewhat old-fashioned example of brand AI in action. In other words, only Alaska Airlines knows why Jenn is called Jenn, but it’s possible Jenn seemed like an inoffensive choice that sounds both familiar and friendly as opposed to say, Al, which is more in line with what Bank of America and Domino’s are thinking, but is also more likely to conjure images of an old man smoking a cigar. Perhaps most curious of all, Wikipedia says the name means "white enchantress" or "the fair one", which could give credence to those who say AI is sexist. (A rep for Alaska Airlines declined to comment, saying the airline is “really tight on resources”.)Īccording to, the name Jennifer peaked in popularity in 1972 – and in 2008, the Social Security Administration ranked Jennifer #84 on its list of most popular girls’ names. Smart money says Domino’s and Bank of America are on the same wavelength – at least in terms of naming their bots.Īnd in 2016, retailer 1-800-Flowers launched an AI-powered gift concierge called Gwyn, but since it is an acronym for Gifts When You Need, it’s unlikely the brand was motivated solely by creating a female persona consumers could boss around.īut then there are bots like Alaska Airlines’ longtime virtual assistant Jenn – who launched Febru– that are a little harder to figure out. And on the other side of the coin, there’s Dom, the male voice-ordering assistant from pizza chain Domino’s. I have a feeling that this isn’t the case, but when deciding on a familiar name for an AI assistant you’re left with two buckets of possible names- male names and female names.” A rose by any other name…įunny enough, a lot of bots end up with female names – at least historically – but that’s not to say simply because they have female names, AI is rife with sexism.įor example, financial services company Bank of America is preparing to release a bot called Erica later this year – although the name presumably hails from the word America itself. “The question is whether it’s just easier for us to interact with something when we assign a gender to it. “It is a program, it doesn’t have genitals,” Camire said. Joey Camire, strategist at innovation and brand design consultancy Sylvain Labs, agreed we’re ultimately gendering a genderless entity.
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