Talk to Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa and you'll notice a common trait: They both have female voices. While this can help make robotic assistants more relatable and natural to converse with, it has assigned a gender to a technology that's otherwise genderless. Now, researchers are hoping to offer a new alternative by launching what they're calling the world's first'genderless voice.' To create'Q', researchers recorded voices from participants who identify as non-binary, or neither exclusively female nor male. Researchers then tested the voice on 4,600 people across Europe.

If you put an AI in charge of your house -- letting it control the lights, the alarms, the temperature, and so on -- how would you want it to act? Should it be "autonomous and challenging" or "obedient and assisting"? Would you prefer if it sounded male, female, or if it was gender neutral? These are just some of the questions Ikea is asking its customers in a new survey titled "Do you speak human?" The questionnaire was launched late last month by SPACE10, Ikea's "future-living lab," which is tasked with exploring how our houses will look and feel in the decades to come.

Picture a virtual assistant that helps find directions, schedules appointments or plays music, and the soothing yet robotic sound of a female voice likely comes to mind. From Apple's Siri to Amazon's Alexa, a majority of the world's most popular virtual assistants have female personas. But that's starting to change as a growing number of consumers -- and companies -- turn to digital assistants. Some developers are going against the grain, creating chatbots and messaging apps that no longer conform to one gender and challenging a tradition of female digital assistants that some say display submissive personalities. Making virtual assistants female by default can be bad for business and perpetuate stereotypes, these chatbot developers say, so they're offering more options to consumers.