This is why AI has a gender problem.

• Author: Fung, Pascale
• Position: Artificial intelligence - Report

Byline: Pascale Fung

"Sorry, I don't know that one." Alexa, Cortana, even the automated announcements on public transport - they all have one thing in common: a female voice or female avatar.

I have been working on dialogue systems since the first generation of projects from the early 1990s. By the end of that decade, many American call centres were answered by robot "assistants" who would cheerfully greet customers with "How may I help you?" and handle their various requests for flight booking, movie ticketing and so on.

I proposed the concept of "empathetic machines," which are dialogue systems that can detect human emotions in addition to querying content. In 2015, I and my students set out to showcase our work in interactive dialogue systems in a demonstration for the World Economic Forum.

To give our empathetic machine an avatar, we looked at robotic cartoons like Wall-E, or Big Hero 6, but they seemed so inhuman and hard for users to relate to. I remembered the "paper clip" assistant for Windows from years back and that few users felt inclined to engage with that "virtual assistant".

Little did I know that the creation of the "empathetic" avatar would plunge me and my students deep into the history of robots, virtual assistants, sci-fi, and gender roles in the AI world.

The virtual world

The very first "chatbot" was named Eliza even though it is a silent software programme without any voice or physical form. When I took the "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" class at Columbia University, one of our first programming assignments was to create our own version of Eliza.

In 2016, Microsoft created a chatbot named Tay, with the tweeting style of a "16-year-old teenage girl", who learned to tweet from millions of online Twitter users. Microsoft Xiaoice, who has more than 100 million users on WeChat, is also a female avatar.

Sophia by Hanson Robotics and Erica by Hiroshi Ishiguro are perhaps the most famous humanoid "celebrities". Sophia spoke on 60 Minutes with Charlie Rose, appeared on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, was covered by major newspapers, and had an on screen date with Will Smith. Saudi Arabia bestowed her with citizenship.

Professor Ishiguro, the creator of Erica, famously said that he was trying to make "the most beautiful woman" in Erica. There are different versions of Erica ranging from "demurely conservative" to "sassy and stylish". When Japanese men went on a "date" with Erica, they blushed while flirting with her even though they were fully aware that "she" was actually a machine.

What Sophia and Erica have in common, is that they are both conversation companions. Are virtual assistants and conversation companions female because of the social belief that women are better in these roles?

Meanwhile, physical robots like...