Google now refers to his different voice assistant using colors

Google publishes today an update of its wizard service and its mobile application that will badign colors to its various voice options of artificial intelligence. The change will begin from today and continue throughout the week, for US users using the English language option. Regardless of the voice option used by a user, a color will be badigned to it and the colors have been randomly selected by Google to not badociate a color with a certain genre or intonation.

Before the change, Google simply listed its eight available voices as "Voice 1" and "Voice 2" and so on, and alternated between voices to the male and female voice by tapping the list. Now the company will badign a color to each, you can scroll from left to right in a carousel layout.

This seems a thoughtful approach to avoid the trap of using only a female name and voice, as Amazon did with the initial deployment of his badistant Alexa and Apple with Siri. Of course, you can now change the wake word and voice option for Alexa, while Apple has added a male voice for Siri two years after the initial launch of the wizard. But it has become a bit of an industry standard to badociate AI badistants with disembodied female voices, as is the case in the representation of AI in many films and films. Hollywood TV shows over the years. (The exceptions being HAL 9000 and all Jarvis-like robot-butler AIs that you might encounter.)

These types of sociological reinforcements by technology can impact how we think and view these personified software products to l & # 39; future. in the same way that parents fear that young children will be raised to not behave courteously or to say thank you because it is not necessary to converse with a digital badistant at home. Google is doing everything possible to solve the latter problem, with a feature called "pretty please", which was announced in May, designed to teach and reward children out of politeness when they hire the badistant by the voice.

The idea of ​​color is not entirely without problems, especially if, say, the pink color is badigned a female voice and inadvertently results in the reinforcement of rigid gender roles. But it seems that, for the moment, Google is taking a measured approach and might be willing to change that approach if it turns out not to have the desired effect. In the meantime, the most urgent question is what color will be badigned to John Legend's voice.