It Sounds Like A Woman: Exploring Gender Stereotypes in South Korean Voice Assistants

Abstract

For the past few years, voice assistant (VA) has been widely used around the world. Current voice assistants provide a gendered voice to sound more natural and life-like, but most of them have a female voice as a default voice setting. Our study explored how gender stereotypes of women are reflected in voice assistants with female voices through analyzing five South Korean VAs. We collected 1,602 responses from VAs and conducted a thematic analysis to examine the patterns of the gender stereotype. As a result, we have categorized three distinct characteristics: (1) bodily display, (2) subordinate attitude, (3) sexualization. We suggested that these stereotypical traits could create a power dynamic between users and female agents.