Hey Siri, why is most artificial intelligence 'female'?

Tuesday, 4 June 2019

Even though ASB's digital assistant is named after a man called Joseph, she's a woman called Josie.

Hey Siri, why are you and most of your AI counterparts women?

Artificial intelligence is becoming a bigger part of people's everyday lives, whether it's the chatbot you talk to about your home loan or the 'personal assistant' on your phone.

But there's an increasingly obvious trend: Most of the AI is fronted by female characters. There's Siri on your iPhone, Amazon's smart speaker Alexa, and Vodafone's Kiri to name a few.

Organisations are also using AI in simple forms such as chatbots to answer simple online questions from customers - Spark reportedly refers to its virtual assistant as 'Ivy'.

* Simplicity's bank profit clock criticised as 'gimmicky'

* Meet Josie, ASB's digital assistant, and a New Zealand banking first**

Elizabeth Broadbent, professor of health psychology at the University of Auckland's medical school, said AI researchers wanted their characters to be empathetic. Most developers were men.

'On average females are more empathetic than males. Research suggests that women are more non-verbally expressive than men - have more eye contact, have more fluent speech, and smile more often.

'Women also have better social skills - they listen more and talk less, and are better at facial recognition than men. So, if you want to model an empathetic person, a female is a good choice.'

She said stereotypes about the genders were difficult to overcome, even on AI.

'Research showed that computers with a female voice were rated more informative about love and relationships, whereas computers with a male voice were rated more knowledgeable about computers, despite the computers giving identical information about the topics. Researchers and developers need to think about how we might avoid reinforcing such gender stereotypes.'

At AUT, business information systems lecturer Lena Waizenegger said the female voice was linked to the roles they played.

'Most of them assist or execute tasks that were historically done by women such as scheduling appointments, looking up information, co-ordination and communication.'

Many digital characters were developed in consultation with the employees of a business and usually represented the brand or the image the company wanted to present, she said.

She said female voices were often regarded as warm, welcoming and nurturing, which was an advantage in customer service. People who were worried about 'robots taking over' might be less concerned if they dealt with soft-voiced female platforms, she said.

She said research indicated that within the next couple of years more than eight out of every 10 customer service interactions would not involve a human representative of the business.

Both Broadbent and Waizenegger pointed out that it was possible for the AI to be genderless.

'However, the reason why most AI are gendered is because developers want to make interactions with computers very natural and similar to interactions with humans,' Broadbent said.

She noted that many AI options gave people the option of choosing a different gender or different personality.

'Making people aware of gender issues in AI is a good start to having discussions about the ways we want AI to be developed. Getting more women into IT would be a good start to creating more gender equal teams and bringing gender issues into awareness.'

ASB recently launched its 'digital assistant', targeting SME business owners in the start-up phase.

But while it was named after the bank's first-ever full-time employee, Joseph Coombe, the character is a female called Josie.

Anita Parag, ASB's virtual agent programme lead said it was deliberate.

'Josie is one of the newest faces in the ASB family, representing a long line of banking progress and innovations. The persona we developed for her is someone who is empathetic, professional, smart and represents modern New Zealand. We believe Josie as a strong female character represents ASB well.'

KiwiSaver provider Simplicity launched its chatbot Artie without a view to giving it any particular gender.

'We just sat around one Friday, looked at the image and threw names around. 'Artie' was everyone's favourite,' said founder Sam Stubbs.

He said people had since started to refer to the bot as 'he'.