The tech industry wants to use women’s voices – they just won't listen to them

[Commentary] The voices of women – and their creators’ ingrained concepts of modern womanhood – are leading the AI frontier. But we have no reason to believe that the male-dominated technology industry understands us at all. Siri and her cohort, for example, know how to respond to health crises such as suicidality but do not know what rape is. These robot women have no answer for questions about domestic violence, like a community of real women would. Siri’s makers had apparently not thought about emergencies primarily relevant to women. In fact, Siri even insists she has no gender – but women’s speech is more than just voice sound – it purportedly involves word choices, too. They conditioned a woman and then attempted to neutralize her. The industry wants to use women’s voices but still has no plans to actually listen to them.

If empathy is core to the future of artificial intelligence, worry not – the Singularity is still quite a way off, no matter how many terrifying Holocaust-denying, racist, anti-feminist white millennial-bots Microsoft “accidentally” spawns.