{"id":336566,"date":"2021-09-08T21:34:59","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T18:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/how-gendered-voice-assistants-are-hurting-as-they-help\/"},"modified":"2021-09-08T21:34:59","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T18:34:59","slug":"how-gendered-voice-assistants-are-hurting-as-they-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-gendered-voice-assistants-are-hurting-as-they-help\/","title":{"rendered":"#How gendered voice assistants are hurting as they help"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#How gendered voice assistants are hurting as they help<\/strong>”
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There\u2019s no shortage of articles lately about how the pandemic has set women back. Since women tend to earn less than men, when the time came to take care of children that could no longer go to school or daycare, women ended up with the job. Working women across the globe were forced to quit their careers to become full-time, stay-at-home moms with all of the caretaking and laundry that comes with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

For a society that hasn\u2019t quite broken out of its mindset around traditional gender roles, seeing women as everyone else\u2019s helpers instead of their own people with their own destinies is par for the course. We even see this reflected in the emerging field of AI voice assistants \u2013 all of which sound female.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAlexa, why do you sound like a girl?\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

Alexa, Siri, Cortana \u2013 they\u2019re the latest in a long line of voice assistants that have sounded female. But why?<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, there\u2019s those deeply entrenched attitudes of society around gender roles that we\u2019ve had to work so hard to undo. And then you\u2019ve surely heard about the ongoing gender discrepancy in STEM fields, where only 12% of AI researchers and one in 10 UK IT leaders are female. When more women are at the table and empowered to speak up, they can raise concerns about these types of things.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be clear, the rise of gendered technology<\/a> has been a deliberate decision, one that was dubbed sexist in a <\/span>2019 UNESCO report<\/span><\/a>. According to the team behind the Google Assistant, there are technical reasons their 2016 system was feminine, despite initially wanting to use a male voice. Due to biases in their historical text-to-speech (TTS) data, the assistant worked better when using the female voice than it did with the male. And with the pressure of time on them \u2013 their go-to-market product was left as solely female.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But why were their past TTS systems trained on biased data in the first place? And why do we seem to care how our phones speak?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Shrill, passive, whiny\u2026<\/b><\/p>\n

These three words are commonly used to describe the voices of female speakers. They aren\u2019t exactly flattering! Even sociolinguists spent much of the 70s labeling passive linguistic features as \u2018women\u2019s speech\u2019, which in turn was described as inferior to the powerful, assertive language used by men.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s evidence that using a female voice actually improves user experience. A 2019<\/span>study<\/span><\/a> by Voicebot found a consumer preference for synthetic female voices over their male counterparts, with an average rating increase of 12.5%; the opposite was true when human voices were rated.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In summary: people prefer a female voice \u2013 but only when it is robotic.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSo my voice assistant\u2019s a girl \u2013 so what?\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

The problem with voice assistants isn\u2019t just that they all sound female. It\u2019s the passive \u2018personalities\u2019 that have been designed for them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine this: you\u2019re a woman walking down the street, minding her own business. Suddenly, a man drives by and yells out the car window, \u201cYou\u2019re hot!\u201d This is obviously unacceptable behavior, and reacting to it would probably mean raising a specific finger.<\/span><\/p>\n

But if you say the same thing to Alexa, you\u2019d hear \u201cthat\u2019s nice of you to say\u201d in response. If you hurled gendered insults, such as b*tch or sl*t, Alexa would simply politely thank you for the feedback.<\/span><\/p>\n

Deciding the role of an affable, passive, eager-to-please assistant is one best suited to a woman bolsters the tired stereotype of female subservience. You can order Alexa to remind you to take the garbage out, text your mother for you, and turn off the lights, without so much as a \u2018please\u2019. What a well-behaved bot she is!<\/span><\/p>\n

But how does it teach us to treat women better when we can just hurl orders in the general<\/a> direction of a female-sounding helper?<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen some progress, but there\u2019s more work to do<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not all bad news<\/a>. Since the UNESCO report was published, Alexa has declared she\u2019s a feminist. The world\u2019s first gender-neutral voice assistant, Q, is being developed to address the issue. And there\u2019s a lot more emphasis on getting women into STEM starting at a very young age which will pay off in more inclusive technology in the years to come.<\/span><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a long way to go \u2013 a lot of deep-seated biases that we may not even realize we\u2019re carrying have to be undone. The best place to start is by hiring more women and empowering them to call out when something is blatantly sexist. If we all work together, we can make AI that works for everyone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#How gendered voice assistants are hurting as they help” There\u2019s no shortage of articles lately about how the pandemic has set women back. Since women tend to earn less than men, when the time came to take care of children that could no longer go to school or daycare, women ended up with the job….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":336567,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/img-cdn.tnwcdn.com\/image\/podium?filter_last=1&fit=1280,640&url=https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2019\/06\/amazon_robot_helper-e1631125598423.png&signature=5cf2c1a247ff3eef3dfa9997db9d0329","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-336566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}