sandwiches can also be a paid skill, earning a lot of money in a sandwich truck in a major metropolis, but usually domestic skills like these are ignored and unpaid. what a shame.

Bixby is definitely more masculine than feminine. Samsung actually renamed it to Sam (and gave it a feminine avatar) when they made it smarter. Google Assistant was only called Majel internally and very briefly, as a reference to the voice of the Star Trek computer. Externally, it was always Google Assistant until it was replaced with Gemini. Alexa is still Alexa. Siri is still Siri. Cortana was replaced by Copilot. By my count, that's one masc -> fem, one fem -> neutral, one neutral -> neutral, and two unchanged.

It's interesting you cite that article, because it was written in 2018 and presented feminist arguments that we should stop making AI assistants female-coded. Now that the industry has done that exact thing, it's being criticized for it? It looks a lot of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Tbf, Cortana stems from a fictional AI that has far higher levels of autonomy. I don't think it was chosen with "let's find a good name for a limited AI interface" in mind.

That has nothing to do with what the post is saying, though. The claim is that techbros stopped using female names because they thought their AI could become sentient. And they're using the "Voice assistants had female names" thing as "evidence"

Also, how many women named Bixby do you know of?

The default voice is also fem

I think it's less true now than it once was, but I remembering hearing somewhere that pre-recorded messages on trains/subways/in stations tend to use feminine voices for information, and masculine voices for instructions.

There are definitely still times on the London Underground where you'll hear announcements that switch in the middle, and that does usually seem to be the pattern.

(I realise this doesn't really apply to GPSes, but your comment is what reminded me, so. 😅)

Etymology is not the same as meaning.

And Alexa was named after the library of Alexandria

American take: computer voices should be female because the higher pitch is easier to understand in an environment with any significant background noise.