“We had a lot of internal debates about this, with a lot of potential paths such as picking a candidate, talking about AIs not having the right to vote, or picking a joke candidate,” Houston says. “As we thought about why a customer might be asking this question, we didn’t believe it was to actually get a recommendation on who to vote for, nor did we want to provide one. It was most likely to see what she would say. So we decided to do a mixture of truth and humor, with Alexa saying there weren’t any voting booths in the Cloud. We wanted to avoid accidentally reinforcing the idea of her as subservient by pointing out she didn’t have the right to vote — but that she’d vote for her favorite robot BB-8 since she ‘likes the way he rolls.’”