Digital Assistants Get Women's Names--Unless They're 'Lawyers'

Last month, law firm Baker & Hostetler announced that it would employ IBM's artificially intelligent lawyer, Ross, to help ease its tedious workload. In a statement, the firm's chief technology officer said, "we believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients." Ross, a system built on the back of IBM's Watson, claims to be able to interpret questions lawyers ask it, and read "through the entire body of law and returns a cited answer and topical readings from legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly." But the first thing I noticed about Ross wasn't how many legal documents it can search at once, or how accurate it claims to be. It was the name: Ross.