When women are over-represented in the workforce, it tends be in industries of assistance – cleaning, nursing, secretarial work and, now, the world of virtual assistants. Research by Unesco has shown that using default female voices in AI – as Microsoft has done with Cortana, Amazon with Alexa, Google with Google Assistant and Apple with Siri – is furthering the belief that women exist merely to help men to get on with more important things. There is no real reason for AI technologies to be gendered at all, but we are at the mercy of tech companies "staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams", fixated on living out a Captain Kirk fantasy and delegating to the subservient, silky-voiced computers of Star Trek. These systems are unapologetically built by men, for men. They can even struggle to understand the "breathy" voices of women as software is often developed with male voice samples.

More people will speak to a voice assistance machine than to their partners in the next five years, the U.N. says, so it matters what they have to say. The numbers are eye-popping: 85% of Americans use at least one product with artificial intelligence (AI), and global use will reach 1.8 billion by 2021, so the impact of these "robot overlords" is unparalleled. But (AI) voice assistants, including Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google's Assistant are inflaming gender stereotypes and teaching sexism to a generation of millennials by creating a model of "docile and eager-to-please helpers," with acceptance of sexual harassment and verbal abuse, a new U.N. study says. A 145-page U.N. report published this week by the educational, scientific and cultural organization UNESCO concludes that the voices we speak to are programmed to be submissive and accept abuse as a norm. The report is titled, "I'd blush if I could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills Through Education."

At CES, LG announced that its 2019 ThinQ AI TVs would support Amazon Alexa, and now the voice assistant has arrived in 14 countries. On top of Google's Assistant, you'll be able to use it on any of the ThinQ AI 4K models including NanoCell and OLED models. If you own one, you'll be able to access numerous Alexa Skills, ask questions, control smart home devices and more, without needing an Echo or other Alexa devices as before As with any Alexa device, you can string together a series of commands using Alexa routines. For instance, you can get the traffic, weather and your agenda for the day by saying, "Alexa, start my morning." You can also listen to music, audio books and other content, and get all the latest Alexa updates and features.

Artificial intelligence voice assistants with female voices reinforce existing gender biases, according to a new United Nations' report. The new report from UNESCO, entitled "I'd Blush If I Could," looks at the impact of having female voice assistants, from Amazon's Alexa to Apple's Siri, projected in a way that suggests that women are "subservient and tolerant of poor treatment." The report takes its title from the response Siri used to give when a human told her, "Hey Siri, you're a b-tch." Further, researchers argue that tech companies have failed to take protective measures against abusive or gendered language from users. "Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like'hey' or'OK,'" the researchers write.

Artificial intelligence has long been thought of in terms similar to that of fusion power -- it's always 20 years away. Outside, it was a normal morning. Inside, looking out the window and barely noticing the chickadee, the business woman, a manager at a large call center downtown, waited for her morning coffee. It was a short wait. Her coffee maker knew that she woke at 5:30 a.m. It knew that because the alarm clock in the woman's bedroom sensed her movement and saved that information to the woman's Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. The coffee maker, also tied to that AWS account, took the hint and turned itself on. Ten minutes later, the shower came on in the bathroom. This also was noted by the house's systems and that data point was duly recorded by the woman's AWS account. That was the next cue for the coffee maker. It was plumbed directly into the house's water lines, and it opened the valve and filled itself with just the right amount of water to brew the coffee. It was brewing as the woman dressed, and five minutes after the woman appeared, the coffee was delivered to her by her Boston Dynamics personal assistant. She took a sip, just as the chickadee flew away. It was now 6:30 a.m., and time to leave for the office. Just like every other weekday, it would be a peaceful commute. As she left her apartment building and the door closed behind her, her ride was just pulling up to the curb.

Technology is taking our day to day life and businesses to the next level. Yes, the days of doing everything manually is no more. Imagine if someone from the 1950s traveled through time to 2019, they would marvel at the way we use our handheld devices to navigate around the town, the way assistants such as Alexa, Cortana and Siri are responding to our queries, and would be stunned by our addiction towards social media platforms. How AI is disrupting every industry Artificial Intelligence may be considered a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution by offering more transformative experiences than any other industrial revolution before. It is the core concept where computers and machines exhibiting intelligence like humans.

Beginning as early as next year, many people are expected to have more conversations with digital voice assistants than with their spouse. Presently, the vast majority of these assistants--from Amazon's Alexa to Microsoft's Cortana--are projected as female, in name, sound of voice and'personality'. 'I'd blush if I could', a new UNESCO publication produced in collaboration with Germany and the EQUALS Skills Coalition holds a critical lens to this growing and global practice, explaining how it: The title of the publication borrows its name from the response Siri, Apple's female-gendered voice assistant used by nearly half a billion people, would give when a human user told'her', "Hey Siri, you're a bi***." Siri's submissiveness in the face of gender abuse – and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women – provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education. According to Saniye Gülser Corat, UNESCO's Director for Gender Equality, "The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them."

"It sounded very real," Mr. Tran said in an interview after hanging up the call with Google. Google later confirmed, to our disappointment, that the caller had been telling the truth: He was a person working in a call center. The company said that about 25 percent of calls placed through Duplex started with a human, and that about 15 percent of those that began with an automated system had a human intervene at some point. We tested Duplex for several days, calling more than a dozen restaurants, and our tests showed a heavy reliance on humans. Among our four successful bookings with Duplex, three were done by people.

One of the most interesting demos at this week's Google I/O keynote featured a new version of Google's voice assistant that's due out later this year. A Google employee asked the Google Assistant to bring up her photos and then show her photos with animals. She tapped one and said, "Send it to Justin." The photo was dropped into the messaging app. From there, things got more impressive.

From personal assistants to legal counsel on parking fines, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have established their potential as disruptive technology that will alter industries. With each passing day, further discoveries enable AI to become more sophisticated and viable in our world. Naturally, like all things digital, AI has had a profound impact on digital marketing as well. From Google's RankBrain search engine algorithm to Amazon's personalized recommendations, it is powering the world's leading organizations and changing the face of the modern digital marketing landscape. Currently, I work as senior vice president of marketing at CUJO AI, an AI-driven network security and intelligence company.