![]() In Microsoft’s case, it sounds like Cortana is female-only, in keeping with her video game persona. ![]() What about this idea that the personality - and both Apple and Microsoft clearly want us to view Siri and Cortana as personalities - is female and not male, responsible for what amount to secretarial duties like creating alarms, reminders and appointments? To be fair, Apple has a male voice option in iOS, but does anyone use it? But she’s also a character who’s essentially imprisoned - literally in the series’ case - within the psyche of an adolescent male’s fantasy notion of a Campbellian hero figure: a simultaneously fleshed-out yet hyper-fleshy persona - she’s all but nude in these games, her female parts exponentially more detailed as console graphics and design techniques have improved - who appears in hologram form, Obi-Wan-like, only if Obi-Wan were a nubile pole dancer.įorget Halo for a moment. On the one hand, she’s a strong-willed and multidimensional female persona in a series that’s been fictively nuanced enough to draw the attention (and participation) of a Hugo and Nebula award-winning writer like Greg Bear. More importantly, from game one (released back in 2001 for the original Xbox) through Halo 4 (released in November 2012 for the Xbox 360), she’s been a sometimes controversial symbol. For starters, she’s a character in a militaristic sci-fi video game that, for all its popularity in gaming-dom, locates her impetus well outside the entertainment mainstream - and as the historical purview of a very specific, mostly not-female demographic. Cortana, the name Microsoft’s given its response to Apple’s Siri virtual assistant, may turn out to be a bolder move for the company than I suspect many realize.
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