Why Alexa struggles to take orders from a woman

SMART speakers often do not understand what women want because they are built predominantly by men, a study suggests.

About two thirds of women say voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa have difficulty responding to their commands, according to a survey of 1,000 people by Yougov.

“Our research reveals that women are more likely to encounter problems being understood by a smart speaker than men, with 67 per cent of female owners saying that their device fails to respond to a voice command at least sometimes,” Yougov said.

Artificial intelligence struggles with women’s vocal pitch more than with the deeper tones of a male voice, experts have claimed. In many cases the software has been developed by men and using male voice examples, so its understanding of female commands is relatively shallow.

Rachael Tatman, data scientist at Kaggle, an online data and machinelearning community owned by Google, said there was a long history of speech recognition performing better for men than women.

“The problem is not with how women talk,” Ms Tatman, who has a PHD in linguistics from the University of Washington, wrote in a blog. “Women’s voices are different from men’s voices, though, so a system designed around men’s voices just won’t work as well for women’s.”

One of the problems is a lack of diversity in the AI industry. According to the World Economic Forum’s gender gap report, only 22 per cent of AI professionals globally are female.

Zoë Webster, director of AI and data economy at Innovate UK, a government-backed body, said changing the female balance in the AI industry was vital. “In the big corporates, men still outnumber women,” she said. However, it was a matter not of making up the numbers but of making the existing female voices count, she added.