In this episode, Jill invites Lisa Smith to step into the host’s chair and interview Jill about her research on the gendering of virtual assistants. Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant were all released with female voices originally, and many of them still have female voices and mannerisms. We will examine why this is, and what impact this might have.
Transcripts can be found here:
https://gendersextech.opened.ca/2022/06/17/transcripts-for-episode-seven/
References:
Andraste’s Gadfly (A Dragon Age and Philosophy Podcast) https://andrastesgadfly.opened.ca/
Guzman, Andrea (2017) “Making AI Safe For Humans: A Conversation With Siri” Socialbots: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality, R. W. Gehl & M. Bakardjieva (Eds.) Routledge
https://en.unesco.org/Id-blush-if-I-could
Beauvoir S. (1953) The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley. Everyman Library.
Harding, Sandra (2015) Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research, University of Chicago Press.
Hegel, G.W.F., Miller, A and Findlay, J. (1977) The Phenomenology of Spirit, Clarendon Press.
Koenecke, A., Nam, A., Lake, E., Nudell, L., Quartey, M., Mengesha, Z., Toups, C., Richford, J.R., Jurafsky, D., and Goel, S. (2020) “Racial Disparities in Automated Speech Recognition,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the Unities States of America, 117(4) 7684-7689. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32205437/
“Meet The Real Voice of Siri” Oprah Winfrey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjKWFENl6ek