Containment and decontainment of digital voice assistants

Home-based digital voice assistants, or what Strengers and Kennedy (2020) call "smart wives," are commonly coded "default" feminine by voice, name, personality traits, and traditional feminized roles and/or form. Devices such as Google Home or Amazon Alexa embody and contain these feminized personas within spheres and cylinders known as "dots," "pods," or "minis." This paper situates digital assistants within a long history of artificial women as repositories of masculine ideals of perfected femininity, whether as beautiful gynoids, smart AIs and chatbots, or as maternal techno-spaces. It looks at the dynamics of containment and leakage of these digital assistants, which unquestioningly obey their users, but also pass data back to their corporate creators. While many science fiction narratives feature a "decontained" artificial woman who escapes her servile role and becomes a "threat that must be controlled" (Bergen 2016), we speculate on the possibilities of decontainment as a deliberate design process to reveal and disrupt the personalities, social roles, and biographies of current and emerging conversational agents.