Gendering Social Robots: Personality
Personality
Professional
Emotional expression
Sassy
Cynical
Cheery
Roboticists build “characters.” The makers of Care-O-Bot 4 created, in their words, a “gentleman”—a gentleman is always present without being intrusive, offering help and assistance in a courteous and independent way. A personality is built by appearance, voice, word choice and response, movement, and behaviors.
Siri—with programed and learned responses—was designed to be “slightly sassy and demure,” in her assistant role. In response to human harassment, Siri’s programmers have made Siri’s responses less polite and more assertive (Coren, 2017). This is important; how humans treat machines might have implications for human-human interaction.
