Ohh So, This Is Why All Voice Assistants Are Female

Voice assistants technically started when satellite-based radionavigation systems began instructing us where to go, and at times steering us to the edges of steep high-faces of rock and into rivers.

Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Bixby … it didn’t take long before voice assistants made the leap from our vehicles to our phones, and now they even dwell in our homes.

The VA’s do everything from checking weather conditions to reminding us of all those dreary things we can’t be daunted to remember for ourselves.

Notice anything about them, however? They are all decidedly female, given women’s alias’ by default and feminine, soothing voices. How come, though?

Well, one reason being we’re used to talking with incorporeal women. In the beginning, telephone operators were plucked from the most farfetched demographic ever: teenage boys!

Telegraph operators were largely male teens, and that was fine — because they didn’t need to physically talk to anyone. Still, boys haven’t transformed but so much in the last 100 years, and accordant to a New England Historical Society study, they were almost vile to customers.

There were a ton of issues with practical jokes and swearing, so Alexander Graham Bell hired a young lady named Emma Nutt. She was friendly, polite, she memorized all the numbers there were, and she adored her job. In fact, she was so good at it that telephone operator became one of the stronger jobs a woman could get (at that time). Women were so much more congenial than their teenage counterparts that by the finalization of the 1880s — nearly all operators were women.

With that said — we’ve had a long time to get used to a facilitative, disembodied female voice at the other end of our neat new tech devices (e.g. phones), and — it remains that way today.

Too, according to Business Insider, female voices are used with VA’s because individuals are more likely to see an inanimate object with a lady’s voice as more caring and more accommodating.

There are a plethora of other words linked to how surveyors view female devices, like sympathetic, cordial, friendly and nurturing.