What do Alexa, Siri, Lu and Bia have in common? Digital assistants, sexism and ruptures of gender performances

Abstract

The digital personal assistants are communication artefacts that help users execute daily activities in an automatized fashion, by means of natural language either spoken or written. Amongst the first type ones are Alexa (Amazon) and Siri (Apple), whereas we can highlight Lu (Magazine Luiza) and Bia (Bradesco) as examples of the second type. They are robots portrayed as humanlike female characters, and suffer constant verbal aggression by the users. Based on theoretical discussion about the relationships between technology and gender, as well as an empirical look at cases involving the before mentioned assistants, we present recently made changes to their own discourse as a way to oppose insults, arguing that they can be considered intentional performance ruptures. We conclude that, although this is a first step against sexism, the updates are still insufficient, and gender oppression is still at place, even with non-human agents.

Keywords
digital personal assistants; gender; technology; performance; sexism