"We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment"

"as Jessi Hempel explains in Wired, “People tend to perceive female voices as helping us solve our problems by ourselves, while they view male voices as authority figures who tell us the answers to our problems. We want our technology to help us, but we want to be the bosses of it, so we are more likely to opt for a female interface.”...

Bot creators aren’t ignorant of the potential negative influences of their bots’ femininity. “There’s a legacy of what women are expected to be like in an assistant role,” Harrison said at the Virtual Assistant Summit. “We wanted to be really careful that Cortana…is not subservient in a way that sets up a dynamic that we didn’t want to perpetuate socially. We are in a position to lay the groundwork for what comes after us.”...

While Siri occasionally hints that I shouldn’t be verbally harassing her—for example, “There’s no need for that” in response to “You’re a bitch”—she mostly evades my comments or coyly flirts with my response: “I’d blush if I could” was her first response to “You’re a bitch.”

While Alexa recognizes “dick” as a bad word, she’s responds indirectly to the other three insults, often in fact thanking me for the harassment. Cortana nearly always responds with Bing website or YouTube searches, as well as the occasional dismissive comment. Poor Google Home just doesn’t get it—yet true to stereotypes about women’s speech, she loves to apologize...

The idea that harassment is only harassment when it’s “really bad” is familiar in the non-bot world. The platitude that “boys will be boys” and that an occasional offhand sexual comment shouldn’t ruffle feathers are oft-repeated excuses for sexual harassment in the workplace, on campus, or beyond. Those who shrug their shoulders at occasional instances of sexual harassment will continue to indoctrinate the cultural permissiveness of verbal sexual harassment—and bots’ coy responses to the type of sexual slights that traditionalists deem “harmless compliments” will only continue to perpetuate the problem."

It's very disturbing, thinking about whoever wrote these scripts 

FB: "For having no body, Alexa is really into her appearance. Rather than the “Thanks for the feedback” response to insults, Alexa is pumped to be told she’s sexy, hot, and pretty. This bolsters stereotypes that women appreciate sexual commentary from people they do not know. Cortana and Google Home turn the sexual comments they understand into jokes, which trivializes the harassment. 

When Cortana doesn’t understand, she often feeds me porn via Bing internet searches"