Many of us can recall the stomach-spinning embarrassment of accidentally calling our teacher “Mom,” an act guaranteed to earn mockery from peers. But, according to teachers, there’s a new Freudian slip in kindergarten town: “Alexa.”
Most of America uses some kind of digital voice assistant, be it Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, or Microsoft’s Cortana, so it’s no surprise that the name would make it into the classroom. Equally unsurprising is that this seems to be a distinctly female phenomenon—male teachers aren’t being mistakenly given the name of any A.I. assistants. That’s because the overwhelming majority of artificial voices are female.
