Female Voice Default

However, by having smart speakers defaulted with the female voice, this makes us subconsciously follow that assistants should be female and that male voices should be in authoritative roles. Therefore, this only enforces our current gender norms.

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Sexual Harassment Behavior

Smart Speakers have passive or tolerable responses to several different types of harassment. Without telling the user clearly that their comments are bad or have the devices handle the situation in a reasonable way, this will only encourage users to continue this type of behavior. With how much people associate smart speakers with a humanly personality, this can subconsciously make users comfortable making sexual harassment comments in the real world.

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But Smart Speakers Are Not Actual Humans...

This is true! Smart Speakers are not humans, therefore, why should anything you say to one even matter? As long as you don’t associate smart speakers as humans, you will be able to hold that boundary.

While that may work for some people, it is incredibly hard to keep that boundary. Smart speakers can be easily anthropomorphized because of how they're made. According to a study, they've learned that the physical location of smart speakers affected people's perceptions, and it made it feel like someone was in their home (Pradhan et al, 2019). Smart speakers are unique because they are devices that are integrated into houses, which makes it hard to disassociate smart speakers from people. Giving voice assistants like Alexa or Siri human-like voices further strengthens that association. Who knows? As time goes on and their popularity continues, smart speakers may be even more characteristic and human-like.

Many companies are hiring creative teams such as film and TV show writers to make the AI have a humanly personality to satisfy their customers (Equals Skill Coalition, 2019).

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Voice assistants are already starting to feel like humans and will be as time goes on. Since there will be an association with voice assistants are like humans, speaking to your Alexa in a sexually charged manner will seem like "practicing" sexual harassment to real humans.

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We don't condone this type of behavior, especially if it'll bring harm to real-life people.

Good practices needs to be placed.

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