( One study, published in 2014, found men are perceived less negatively than women for the same vocal tics, especially the creaky pitch known as vocal fry. Just ask any woman who works in radio about how much unsolicited criticism she receives about the way she talks. Which sounds nice, but doesn’t necessarily hold up to cultural scrutiny. (Nass died in 2013.) “It’s a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.” “It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” the Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, told CNN in 2011. The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles-and that the makers of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations. Not to get overly anthropomorphic here-Amazon’s the one who refers to Echo as part of the family, after all-but if we’re going to live in a world in which we’re ordering our machines around so casually, why do so many of them have to have women’s names? Apple’s Siri can be activated with a “hey,” or with the push of a button. The command for Microsoft’s Cortana-“Hey Cortana”-is similar, though maybe a smidge gentler. And to activate the Echo, you first have to say: “Alexa.” As in, “ Alexa, play rock music.” (Or, more pointedly, “Alexa, stop.”) The monolithic voice-activated digital assistant will, when instructed, play music for you, read headlines, add items to your Amazon shopping cart, and complete any number of other tasks.
You’re supposed to boss it around.īut it still sounds like a bit of a reprimand whenever I hear someone talking to an Amazon Echo. The whole point of having a digital assistant is to have it do stuff for you.
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