The Future of Digital Assistants Is Queer

This November, the Smithsonian's FUTURES festival, featuring innovations that are set to change the world, will include a familiar face. Or, rather, voice: Q, introduced in 2019 as the first "genderless AI voice," is a human voice for use in digital assistants specifically created to be gender-ambiguous. "Q was designed to start a conversation around why we gender technology when technology has no gender to begin with," says Ryan Sherman, one of Q's co-creators. To design the voice, a team of linguists, sound engineers, and creatives collaborated with nonbinary individuals and sampled different voices to land on a sound range they felt had the potential to disrupt the status quo and represent nonbinary people in the world of AI. When Q was announced several years ago, it was hailed as "the genderless digital voice the world needs right now," and an acknowledgment of the harm of feminizing assistants, which perpetuates misogynistic stereotypes of women as submissive and obedient.