'I'D BLUSH IF I COULD' (DIGITAL VOICE ASSISTANTS)

About: 

• Published by: ‘I’d blush if I could’ is a new UNESCO publication produced in collaboration with Germany and the EQUALS Skills Coalition. 
  
  
• Recommendations: The publication shares the first United Nations agency recommendations regarding the gendering of AI technologies, imploring companies and governments to - 
  • end the practice of making digital assistants female by default;
    
    
  • explore the feasibility of developing a neutral machine gender for voice assistants (i.e. neither male nor female);
    
    
  • programme digital assistants to discourage gender-based insults and abusive language;
    
    
  • encourage interoperability so that users can change digital assistants, as desired; and
    
    
  • require that operators of AI-powered voice assistants announce the technology as non-human at the outset of interactions with human users.
    
    
  
  
  

Background:

• From next year onwards, many people are expected to have more conversations with digital voice assistants.
  
  
• Presently, the vast majority of these assistants—from Amazon’s Alexa to Microsoft’s Cortana—are projected as female, in name, sound of voice and ‘personality’.
  
  
• The recent UNESCO report talks about the voice assistants re-enforcing gender stereotypes like in the case of Siri.
  
  
• The title of the publication borrows its name from the response Siri, Apple’s female-gendered voice assistant used by nearly half a billion people, would give when a human user told ‘her’, “Hey Siri, you’re a bi***.”