Reverse Engineering the Gendered Design of Amazon’s Alexa

This article examines the gendered design of Amazon Alexa’s voice-driven capabilities, or, skills, in order to better understand how Alexa, as an AI assistant, mirrors traditionally feminized labour and sociocultural expectations. While Alexa’s code is closed source — meaning that the code is not available to be viewed, copied, or edited — certain features of the code architecture may be identified through methods akin to reverse engineering and black box testing. This article will examine what is available of Alexa’s code — the official software developer console through the Alexa Skills Kit, code samples and snippets of official Amazon-developed skills on Github, and the code of an unofficial, third-party user-developed skill on Github — in order to demonstrate that Alexa is designed to be female presenting, and that, as a consequence, expectations of gendered labour and behaviour have been built into the code and user experiences of various Alexa skills. In doing so, this article offers methods in critical code studies toward analyzing code to which we do not have access. It also provides a better understanding of the inherently gendered design of AI that is designated for care, assistance, and menial labour, outlining ways in which these design choices may affect and influence user behaviours

Reverse engineering · Source code · AI in Service Interactions · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Open Source Software Innovations · Architecture · Software