Sometimes it feels shady to me that all popular voice assistant softwares are female. Google Assistant, Cortana and Alexa. Jarvis was supposed to happen, but it didn't. Samsung's Bixby wasn't making waves and then Samantha happened. cough better not talk about her cough
What I see is that the voice assistant sector is 100% dominated by women. I know they are under represented in the IT industry overall, but the voice assistant industry kinda balances it out.
These ladies are supposed to exist in your homes (along with any other lady). These can dim the lights, play songs and crack (poor) jokes - and then themselves do a "Ha Ha Ha". Can your lady do that, mon ami? She'd rather throw a tantrum because you've grown used to ordering around while slouching and binge watching some garbage web series which wouldn't even have seen the light of the day had there not been these OTT platforms accepting shitty content...
Anyways, back to topic. These devices, apart from (of course) spying on your, are also intended to make you lazy, dependent and used to scary tech you don't actually need. God knows what the Kohler's engineers were thinking when they launched a commode with Alexa built in. Do you really need a female voice originating from there?
Who ever imagined that 21st century boys will be considered cool because they keep a wiretap device in their rooms, which runs proprietary closed source software so you can never be 100% sure what all they are recording. Five years back, I had imagined the future people to be more tech literate and more aware of their digital rights. Unfortunately, the only statistics that have gone up are our stupidity and our reliance on big tech companies. Thanks to affordable high speed internet, we could've worked towards federalization and decentralization of web services. Rather, we are still wasting all our bandwidth transferring bytes from servers owned by big tech corporations.
What's next? We recently got to know that some Amazon Echo devices had been coming equipped with low frequency transmitting devices. And now they come up with what they call Sidewalk. I'd rather call it Amazon Skynet.
Blind trust might work in love; not with proprietary software. But wait... who do you love?