Amazon Alexa reinforces female stereotyping
The use of female voices on voice-powered virtual assistants, including Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google Assistant, portray women as 'obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers', reinforcing gender stereotypes of women, according to a UNESCO report. Responses from AI assistants such as Alexa to verbal sexual harassment tend to be 'deflecting, lacklustre or apologetic', the report said, and appeared to show a greater tolerance towards sexual advances from men than from women. The authors made a series of recommendations on how technology companies can make their virtual assistants less biased, notably by hiring more female programmers and by installing gender-neutral voices rather than making their assistants female by default. System 🤖 Amazon Alexa Operator: Developer: Amazon Country: Global Sector: Media/entertainment/sports/arts Purpose: Provide information, services Technology: NLP/text analysis; Natural language understanding (NLU); Speech recognition Issue: Bias/discrimination - gender
- Date it happened
- 2019-05-01
- Product, system or model
- Amazon Alexa
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