Why do AI assistants mostly have feminine voices?

Have you ever wondered what if Siri or Alexa were a guy? 

Siri, the voice assistant in Apple devices such as the iPhone, though sounds distinctly female but says it does not have a gender. "Don't let my voice fool you: I don't have a gender," it says when asked about its gender.

Alexa, on the other hand, says "she" considers "herself" female. The Google Assistant, while having no gender-specific name, has a female voice too. 

While there are settings where you can give them a traditionally male voice, however that feels rather unsettling.

Why is that? When I put forth this question, I was in turn asked whether I would feel more comfortable having an unknown woman or man in my house? 

I sheepishly answered, a woman I guess, but that's only because I'm a female! But men also prefer the same, evoking the question of why the voice of men incite fear, is there a deeper issue that needs addressing?

Psychology

How long do you have to make a good first impression? About half a second, new research has revealed. Scientists have discovered that humans make judgements on someone's trustworthiness within the first 500 milliseconds of hearing their voice,

An experiment done by University of Glasgow psychologist Phil McAleer showed that people deem female voices more trustworthy.

There are two reasons behind it: pitch and inflection.

The higher pitch of the female voice instilled more confidence in listeners than the lower-pitched male. One super-low-pitched male voice was overwhelming voted the least trustworthy of all. 

Female voices that dropped at the end of a word or phrase (inflection) indicated a degree of certainty, something that made people automatically trust them.

History

Historically, female voices have been used in navigational devices dating back to World War II, when women's voices were employed in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots, reports CNN. 

Also, telephone operators have traditionally been female, making people accustomed to getting assistance from a faceless woman's voice.

More importantly, men are accustomed to women working in the household and cater to their needs, which might have led to them using female voices for AI assistants. 

Gender norms

Men have been hardwired to seek assistance from women and the men involved in developing programmes and AI assistants often select female voices as defaults out of habit.

"It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes," said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of "The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships."

"It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices," he adds.

Miriam Meckel, a professor of corporate communication at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, also points to a number of studies showing that female voices are widely perceived as more pleasant than male ones. This is why the default setting for all voice assistants is female, she says. 

The problem, Meckel argues, is that these voice assistants perform a service that is then associated with women in the real world. 

Whether it is misogyny or simple human nature there remains the question if there will be any deviation from this practice in future or if female voices will continue to dominate the AI world.