My daughter’s Alexa – and it’s no joke
As ‘Beeb’ joins the army of virtual assistants, Rosa Silverman is glad it won’t ruin another female name
Watch out, Alexa: there’s a new virtual assistant in town – and its catchy little name is Beeb. Yes, that is Beeb, as in the Beeb. Unwilling to be outdone by the Amazon behemoth, the BBC has brought us its very own version, which is currently being tested on Windows computers.
Unlike Alexa or Siri, Beeb’s digital voice is “based on that of a UK voice actor with a northern England accent”. Crucially, the voice is a male one.
This is welcome – for reasons both personal and political. In 2016, I named my baby daughter Alexa, and the galling (mis)use of her name in millions of households since has long been a source of irritation to me and other parents of Alexas, as well as the unfortunate human Alexas themselves. Amazon released their virtual assistant in November 2014; as of January last year, over 100million Alexa-enabled devices have been sold.
For some parents, this has all proved actively distressing. After writing about my daughter’s name previously, I was contacted by a reader, the father of another young Alexa, who was fearful her peers would associate saying “Alexa” with issuing a command. How would this affect her growing up? The man’s wife was so anxious, she wanted to change their daughter’s name.
Through him I learnt of the Alexa is a Human campaign, a group run by four mothers of Alexas (one British and three American). They are campaigning for the technology giant to change the “wake” name of its device (that alerts it to a command) to Amazon, Echo or Computer. They also want to spread the message that the existence of Amazon’s Alexa is no licence to tease girls and women with the name; to encourage schools not to employ it, and to generally warn of the risks of using human names for devices. “Using a non-human name prevents women from being bullied, harassed, changing their name and facing continuous unwanted attention,” they say.
Jennifer Clark, a teacher from the US state of Georgia, one of the mothers behind the group, started the campaign when, in July, her eight-year-old daughter told her she was being teased. “They are always pretending I’m the Alexa machine,” the little girl sobbed.
Other parents of Alexas, and women called Alexa themselves, have got in touch with the group to share their own stories of name-related mockery. Included are the father who was told by an elderly woman at a train station that he was “a cruel parent” for naming his daughter Alexa; the girl whose visit to Father Christmas was ruined when he was so busy teasing her about her name that he forgot to ask what she wanted in her stocking; and the adult Alexa who, in church, heard a member of the congregation jokily ask: “What time is it, Alexa?”
Seemingly small incidents in isolation, but, week in and week out, the Alexas of this world and their parents are failing to see the funny side. Older Alexas have even reported using their middle names instead.
This isn’t only an Alexa problem. Last year, a Unesco study found Ai-powered assistants with female voices were perpetuating harmful gender biases. That these female robots were “obliging and eager to please” reinforced the idea that women were “subservient”, and “docile helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command,” it said. “It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility.” Thanks to the technology’s ubiquity, we are raising a generation of children accustomed to issuing orders to a female-sounding machine. The increasing use by children of voice-activated assistants “is likely to have implications around how [they] will learn to communicate,” Simon Leggett, research director at Childwise, has argued.
It’s not hard to see how this will likely include the way boys communicate with girls, and how girls view their roles and identities. Research suggests we unconsciously associate higherpitched voices with traits such as helpfulness, submissiveness and caring.
Google has cited technological constraints that made it easier to work with female voices when it first launched its Assistant. But both Google and Apple’s Siri now offer a male voice option, so it can be done.
Beeb has a big job on his hands. In cementing the role of the male virtual assistant, he can help to dispel two notions: that subservient female robots should be the technological default; and that taking and ruining a name like Alexa is inevitable collateral in the future of voiceactivated homes.