Tech Firms Have An Obsession With 'Female' Digital Servants (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Alexa, Tay, Siri, Cortana, Xiaoice, and Google Now. These technologies all have one thing in common -- they are digital servants aimed at a mass-market audience that feature a "female" voice or persona. And it's not just the voice or persona of the digital persona we interact with that is biased. The results of those interactions also demonstrate male favoritism. It took Apple more than four years to fix Siri's responses to questions about abortion services, and yet the company didn't seem to have any problem programming Siri to search for prostitutes and Viagra. Here's the gender breakdown for the tech workforce of each company:
Microsoft: 83.0% male, 16.9% female
Google: 82.0% male, 18.0% female
Apple: 79.0% male, 22.0% female
Amazon: 61.0% male, 39.0% female

Comments

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[AmiMoJo]

I know you mean well but your post illustrates why this is still an issue. If the ratio of women to men at your university is so low, aren't you interested to know why? Didn't you see the previous articles about Google et. al. trying to help more women to study those things? And then the stuff about hiring just to make up numbers, which I appreciate you might think is the case but it really just undermines women who do get hired. The default is to think of them as a diversity hire, not a competent hire.

It would be nice if these voice assistances let you pick a voice. I'm surprised they don't actually, sat nav has long had that feature. FWIW the British version of Siri is male, his voice being provided by a classically trained actor.

Re:Slashdot

[AmiMoJo]

Slashdot - news for whiny SJWs, stuff to get outraged about.

Oh, the irony. In this case the "SJWs" are not actually outraged or whining, we just want to talk about this. On the other hand people like you are clearly very upset. Did we hurt your poor little feelings? Would you like a special medal for posting, would that make you feel better?

Seriously, the mostly easily offended and whiny bunch are the SJW haters. It's almost comical how easily triggered they are over basically nothing. Worse still they must want to be permanently upset and outraged, otherwise they would just scroll down to the next story.