With the number of questions directed toward voice assistants, they have most likely gained a sizeable amount of data from each user. What this software does with this data is where the ethics of voice assistants is questioned. On the global landscape of AI ethics guidelines, five emerging ethical principles are deemed important – Transparency, Justice and fairness, Non-maleficence, Responsibly and Privacy (Kaul, 2021). The makers of each brand of voice assistants should demonstrate transparency by being blatantly upfront about what commands can be made, where the consumer’s information is going and how it is being used in order to create a more trustworthy relationship between users and the technology (Kaul, 2021). Humans have the right to be informed about the usage of their personal information, and, through transparency of technology and user interaction, people feel more comfortable using the product. By being fair to consumers, it means voice assistants provide the same information to every user, no matter what prior information has been collected beforehand.
Through the means of eliminating bias and informing the consumer about the whole picture, everyone is able for equal opportunity and experience (Kaul, 2021). Responsibility and accountability means acting with integrity, clarifying the attribution of responsibility and data ownership. In case of virtual assistants, this refers to being transparent, fair, disclosing information on responsibility, legal liability and data ownership to consumers (Kaul, 2021). Consumers should clearly be told what their responsibilities are and how their data is being used. Users should be informed of what they’re getting into when taking home a voice assistant. It’s their life that is being affected if they aren’t told all the information they need. Ethics is the key to understanding what a person or brand stands for. Voice assistants are there to help and cater to humans, therefore, their position on the topic of moral obligation matters.Digital assistants have always been a technology that humans were fascinated with. Humans have expressed their eagerness to talk to computers since the first commercial computer was introduced (Hoy, 2018). Drawing on research, it is apparent that there is a growing level of social presence from machines (McLean and Frimpong, 2018). Voice assistants give users the illusion of actual human helpers. As time goes on, humans are considering these machines as real company. Research shows that as computers use natural language, interact with users in real-time and in some cases fulfil traditional human operated social roles (e.g. customer service in a Bank), even advanced computer users often treat machines as social entities (Lombard & Ditton, 2000). Moon (2000) posits that humans are socially oriented beings, and thus apply social roles when interacting with technology such as politeness, pausing for response and curtsy during interactions in the same way as they would with another human (McLean and Frimpong, 2018). Voice assistants have been advanced so much to the point where humans actually treat these machines as other humans. Voice assistants socially benefit humans because their human characteristics allow users to be more comfortable with them and because of the comfort, humans trust these machines more to provide them with adequate information.