It's a phenomenon we might as well get used to, and I think it has less to do with clever marketing than one might initially think. What it boils down to is th

It's a phenomenon we might as well get used to, and I think it has less to do with clever marketing than one might initially think. What it boils down to is that we will interact with interactive characters as though they were people (and hence with gender, at least in the linguistic sense). It wouldn't make sense to consider a page of search engine results a character, or the alarm screen of your phone. But when software is programmed to respond to general input... well for one thing the authors will surely script some responses (as is the case with Siri and Cortana). And something potentially recognisable as a form of personality would probably just fall out of the quirks of the system. We can quibble over whether (linguistic) gender has meaning here but the software is well within the bounds of anthropomorphism. It would be fine to follow Greg Egan's usage with ve and vir for virtual personalities. Or to agree that software is a neuter gender even if it has a soft voice and refers to itself as female. But you're not going to convince people that (even quite limited software) with character and a name shouldn't be anthropomorphised.