While she’s not in a traditional writers’ room—no, it doesn’t look like a scene out of 30 Rock, with writers feasting on pizza and at war over concepts—much of her time is spent coming up with timely jokes. She’s worked on special material for Mother’s Day, and is already gearing up for for New Year’s. Her favorite joke she’s ever written for the Assistant, was pegged to football. “Why did the center freak out during the play? I don’t know, he just snapped.”
According to Skopetos, writing jokes for the Google Assistant isn’t all that different from how you’d develop a regular on a sitcom or craft a standup persona. “We have a basic model for the Assistant of being a smart, humble, polite, person, but it’s always growing and evolving.” Still, there are certain nuances she employs when writing jokes for her own comedy, that you won’t find in one of the Assistant’s zingers. “With my comedy, I can go down a really niche rabbit hole. Like right now I’m working on a character that’s a Grey’s Anatomy surgeon. It’s kind of a niche thing where everyone might not get it, though I think it’s funny. But when I’m working on the Assistant, I have to really try to work in universals, and things that will appeal to everyone,” Skopetos says.
But the pursuit of universal appeal isn’t without its own pitfalls. A recent report from UNESCO found that devices like Amazon’s Alex and Apple’s Siri—all of which use a woman’s voice as the default—perpetuate gender stereotypes. They also encourage the belief that “women are obliging, docile, and eager-to-please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command,” the report stated. Skopetos, who liaises across teams to make sure that the personality of the Assistant stays consistent, says those concerns are “certainly something we think about a lot.“
“The first thing I’ll say is we think of the Assistant as genderless,“ she says. “We never use the pronouns ’he’ or ’she’ when we’re referring to it. And we have a large selection of different voices from different backgrounds that you can choose from.”
Plus, having an acute awareness of how women are depicted and treated as we move about the world is one of the main themes of Skopetos’ own sets. In one of her sketches called, ”What Every Woman You’ve Ever Met Is Thinking”,” she cuts back and forth between the polite conversation a woman is having with a male colleague and her honest inner dialogue, which sounds like the heroine of an action movie plotting the different ways she could take him down in case he tried to make a move. “It’s funny, but it comes from a real place of, yeah, it can be really scary for a woman to be alone in a room with a guy you don’t know,” Skopetos says. “I’m thinking a lot about how I can take my experience as a woman and use comedy to amplify that voice.”
And while Skopetos is just as focused on her personal comedy career as ever—she performs at improv clubs all over New York—it can be tough to balance it all. Though Google is supportive of her second life (her managers will even come to her gigs), it can be straight up exhausting. ”Balancing two careers is a doozy. Just when you think you have it right, something blows up and you have to figure it out all over again,” Skopetos says. But she wouldn’t trade the experience, or what it’s done for her comedic development, for the world. ”It’s given me a broader perspective of how many different experiences and types of people are out there, and how to get into the mindset of putting myself in someone else’s shoes who might be radically different from me, and also write in a way that’s going to be empathetic and passionate to that.”
Samantha Leach is an assistant editor at Glamour. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @_sleach.
