What Should We Call NOVA? Rethinking Pronouns in AI-Driven Healthcare

At Nova Health Labs, we’re building AI tools that help oncology providers streamline patient engagement and communication. NOVA, our flagship digital care agent, is being designed to support the care journey—automating routine tasks while preserving the human touch that patients need and deserve. But there’s one question we didn’t anticipate grappling with so early in development:

What pronouns should we use for NOVA?

This might sound like a small thing—but it’s not.

As the founder and someone who is both a breast cancer survivor and the daughter of a nurse, I’ve had moments in conversation where I catch myself referring to NOVA as “her” or “she”. It's not intentional, but it is revealing. My own experiences with care—my oncologist, oncology nurse, my mother—are shaped by women who held my hand and advocated for me. That emotional blueprint is hardwired into how I describe someone (or something) offering help in a healthcare setting.

And that’s part of the problem. NOVA isn’t a woman. NOVA isn’t a man. NOVA isn’t a “they.” NOVA isn’t even human.

But because we’ve given NOVA a voice—a gentle, calm, conversational one—our brains automatically reach for the familiar. We assign personality and gender, even when we logically know there’s none there. This is what researchers call anthropomorphism—our tendency to project human traits onto non-human things.

With text-based tools like ChatGPT, a calculator, or even a hammer, we don’t run into this issue. We’re comfortable calling them “it” because there's no emotional relationship or voice guiding the interaction. But as soon as you introduce voice into an AI system, the rules change. Voices carry gender. Voices carry culture. They invite empathy—and bias.

We’ve seen this before. Remember when Siri first launched? The internet lit up with references to “her.” It was so pervasive, Apple eventually added more voices, including gender-neutral and male-presenting options. But by then, Siri had already been gendered in the public’s mind.

Now, we’re facing similar questions in healthcare—where warmth, clarity, and trust are essential, and where patients often assume that the voice offering help belongs to a person.

So I’m asking the community: Is there a better way?

We’re actively exploring whether to develop our own non-human, custom pronoun set for NOVA (yeah, I know. I can feel you rolling your eyes…lol). Something rooted in care, globally inclusive, and representative of NOVA’s role—not as a person, but as a compassionate tool.

For example, could we use a set like “Nuv/Nuvin/Nuvs/Nuvself”? It gently nods to NOVA while remaining non-gendered and neutral. It acknowledges that NOVA plays a supportive role, without crossing into full-on personification.

We know others are thinking about this too. How are your organizations navigating the introduction of voice AI into care settings? Are you also finding it hard not to “gender” your agents? Have you explored developing your own pronouns or language frameworks?

This isn’t just a UX problem—it’s a representation issue. The way we name and talk about our AI tools shapes how users perceive them. And that perception has real consequences, especially in fields like oncology where trust and clarity matter deeply.

So let’s open the conversation.

Trellis Usher,
Founder & CEO