The Voice of Technology: Understanding the Work of Feminine Voice Assistants and the Feminization of the Interface

Abstract

In the past decade, people have come to rely on digital voice assistants to help them interact with technology and perform tasks in every aspect of their lives. These digital voice assistants are friendly, responsive, polite, and unmistakably feminine. In this thesis, I explore how the labor of Alexa is represented in technical and popular discourse and what these representations suggest about the gender, race, technicality, and personification of Alexa. In order to more broadly contextualize and understand Alexa’s labor, I look at the systems of (largely white) women and technology that have existed throughout history, such as weavers and their looms, assembly line workers and their conveyor belts, typists and their typewriters, or operators and their switchboards. I argue that in order to use these technologies, people (largely men) relied on women to traverse the space between them and the technology itself, thus these women worked to make technology easy to use, pleasant, and most importantly, less technical. By analyzing representations of Alexa’s labor through sources such as Amazon advertisements, websites, and Alexa skills, I argue that Alexa’s labor is represented similarly to the labor of these women, as feminine, human, non-technical, and (implicitly) white. In this way, the labor that Alexa performs is strictly relegated to the side of the consumer and user of technology. Much like operators and typists, Alexa becomes part of the computer interface itself and operates as a (feminized) way for people to use technology. Alexa’s labor mimics the way that women have worked with technology for decades, only now, it is the computer interface itself that is becoming pleasant, helpful, and (quite literally) feminine. Alexa perpetuates femininity not just in voice and name, then, but in labor as well, working to make users feel more comfortable, more trusting, and more willing to give up control.