Inclusive Conversational AI: The case of female voice assistants

The idea of designing an artificial woman is a tale as old as time. We can go back over 2000 years to Ancient Greece and find the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with one of his statues which was granted life by Aphrodite. In modern times, we have countless examples of female AI personas, both in science fiction and in real-live systems. Some are embodied, such as Sophia, but some are purely voice-based, such as Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's array of bots such as Cortana, Xiaoice and Zo.