While Alexa was once simply a woman's name, it has become widely associated with Amazon, since the tech giant launched a smart assistant with the same name back in 2014. Not only is the AI-powered system named Alexa, it is also the default'wake word' used to alert Amazon devices that an instruction or question will follow. This has led to women named Alexa becoming the butt of recurring jokes in which their name is shouted, followed by a command. Unbeknown to many Alexa users, a sneaky trick lets you change your smart assistant's name, and even voice. However, there is a catch - as it stands, you can only choose from a few Amazon-sanctioned alternatives.

Playing with my Lego, as a child, I would build human-like figures. I would create a whole cast of goodies and baddies, who would invariably end up fighting. The goodies always spoke with a North American drawl, while the baddies spoke English with heavy foreign accents. The very few female characters in my games were either shrieking, hyper-feminine princesses who needed saving, or near-voiceless helpers who looked after the base and cared for the wounded heroes. My bedroom carpet was a showground for the stereotypes of the day.

While supercomputer engineers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the field of computational intelligence, they may also be reinforcing outdated gender norms through the anthropomorphism of their creations. Although they may be driving technological progress, this could be at the expense of socio-cultural progression. Most pertinent is the fact that the world's top supercomputer, IBM Watson, has a man's name and voice while nearly all virtual assistants have female names and voices -- Siri, Alexa, Cortanae. This has most frequently been attributed to a marketing strategy. Jason Mars, CEO of Clinc financial software, told the New York Times that he gave his artificial intelligence (AI) assistant a "helpful, young Caucasian female" voice because, in order to be successful commercially, "there's a kind of pressure to conform to the prejudices of the world."

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.