Here is an interesting question… Why are all the artificial intelligence devices females? Like robots and assistants.

Siri, iPhone assistant Apple made, is a female. In Japan there are robots for the staff of the hotel that have been made as female personas. Why is that so?
There is certainly an answer for this but it is not an easy one.

We have been witnesses throughout the history that female part of our population has been the one with the role of assisting, helping and caring. Nurses, housewives, housemaids, teachers… all of these and many other calls were mostly female calls. That might be one of the reasons too. Throughout the history doing things of helping, caring, assisting has been a “women’s job”. The same story happened in the technological world.

There are even some studies that show that women in prisons as guards influence on the lowering of the rates of stress, anxiety and violence among the inmates. Women are percieved throughout the history as the gentler, kinder, and less aggressive, and some could say it is even easier to approach a woman than a man.

Siri is the most well-known example of artificial intelligence. The name in Norse means “a beautiful woman who leads you to victory”. The default voice of Siri is actually female American persona known as Samantha. Now you can have Siri in both male and female voice and on many languages.

There is Cortana too, Microsofts contribution to this story. Cortana is female too.

Karl Fredric MacDorman is a computer scientist and expert in this field and he made a study about how men and women react to voices of different genders. He came to a conclusion there is a big stigma around the terms of men preferring male voices too.

The rise of fembots is something to discuss as you can see. We are probably going to see them more.
In Japan there is Repliee R1, based on the 5 year old daughter of the scientist who made it.

Ayako Fujii is a female news announcer in Japans national public broadcasting organization.

In Japan we’ve got also Actroid series of robots by the company Kokoro. This is for the needs of the first robot staffed hotel in Japan and in the world.

Female artificial intelligence personas can be found in fiction too. The movie “Her” is about an operating system of this kind named Samantha. This is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Her human “owner” who is male, eventually falls in love with her. It. However to call it.

However we have another trend here. Hollywood perceived robots quite scary. Terminator and Matrix… remember?

Basically, females are according to studies perceived as less threatening or more friendly than men.
There are even some ideas about making childlike robots. People then could get more comfortable with robots.

But that’s another topic…