Smart Voice Assistants: Early Adopters’ Uses and implications for the study of the Internet

• In Event: 3267 - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 6. Technologies and the Everyday

Abstract

Promoted as smart helpers that make users lives’ easier, in-home smart voice assistants (SVA) have only recently started to find their way into people’s homes and lives. Principally framed by domestication theory, affordances (Gibson, 1986) and use genres (Bakardjieva, 2005; Bakardjieva, 2006), this study explores early adopters’ uses of in-home smart voice assistants. Based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews, we develop a typology of use genres, and describe spatially distributed uses. The interviews revealed a number of use genres that go beyond the well-known convenience and fun/entertainment. Specifically, the use genres of companionship, self-control and productivity, sleep aid, health care, peace of mind and increased accessibility emerged from participants’ accounts of their experiences with the devices. In addition, we found spatially distributed uses based on the users’ perception of the spatial affordances of SVAs. These spatially distributed uses not only reconfirm the “renegotiation and redefinition of the boundaries between the (private) home and the public world" (Bakardjieva, 2005:163), they also lead us to point out a potential extension of domestication theory for the analysis of the appropriation of the voice-based connected home.

Authors

• Saba Rebecca Brause

• Grant Blank, University of Oxford