One of the comments is What's with the anthropomorphism? It's weird that you keep calling a piece of software a "she". and I have to say I fully agree: it made the entire article just weird to read?
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.
Cortana comes from the Halo games, where she is an AI, portrayed as a female. I don't find it weird at all. Then again, in my language we must use male or female for things forcefully, so Siri is also female for me.
I realize that would be the case for English speakers... In Spanish doesn't sound that weird because nouns have genres anyway. For instance, in Latin America a computer is a "she"
It has irked me as well for some time.
It is smart PR from Apple and Microsoft to present their softs as AIs with personhood but these are 'just' logic trees.
There is nothing grammatical about it in English. In practice gender in British English generally specifies the actual sex of the object, except when the object doesn't have a sex in which case it is merely conventional. Things that are sufficiently important to us are anthopomorphized and this a social and cultural process rather than a strictly grammatical one. Ships are conventionally female in British English, so are cars in some circles, but there is nothing grammatical about it. Similary my wife refers to her Android tablet as he, and he has a name; however the name is ungendered in modern British English while it is a female given name in Ancient Greek.
This is a piece of software, yes, but it is a piece of software portraying a fictional female character. "She" makes perfect sense in this case, not to mention all the other instances where gendered pronouns are used to refer to inanimate objects. I think this complaint is making a mountain out of a molehill.
