Alexa, Start My Day - The Experience of Integrating Voice-Activated Personal Assistants in Home Environments

Voice-activated personal assistants in the form of smart speakers have become one of the most impactful technologies that may significantly alter people’s everyday life. The thesis researches how users experience the integration of this emerging technology in their home environments while investigating into the perceived usefulness of the device and the emotional processing behind the usage of the voice interface. For this, a mixed method approach of combining an autoethnography and in-depth interviews was used. Out of this, three major themes came up that are linked to each other through the uniqueness of the voice interface. First, the users are adopting through a conscious habituation and modification process the personal assistant into their everyday life. Especially for simple and repeated practices that are short, spontaneous and easy to conduct, the integration of personal assistants was perceived as particularly useful. Second, the usage of the personal assistant as a new technology is a highly emotional process. Depending on users’ characteristics, which determine their belonging to either the group of early adopters or early majority, they experience different levels of playfulness and curiosity. Although these feelings decreased for all interviewees over time, the joy of using the personal assistant declined faster for users with a more superficial usage of just the basic functionalities compared to more technological affine users. Besides this involvement, a bonding relationship is created through the sensitivity of people towards voice. Interviewees started automatically to apply social rules to the personal assistant. This treatment of the device is connected to the concept of anthropomorphism which follows into the phenomenon of media equation where people unintentionally react to technologies as they would do to other interaction humans. In doing so, they even ascribe social rules to the device which intensifies the human-computer interaction even more. These two findings are connected to each other in the process of mutual shaping between the personal assistants and the users. Third, with the placement of the personal assistant in private home environments and the emotional bonding, the perception of privacy issues has to be differentiated between II personal private and institutional privacy. While data collection and further usage from suppliers are hard to imagine for users, they are less concerned about a possible loss of privacy. Because of this low level of privacy literacy about how suppliers and third parties are using their data, they are also not taking any actions to secure them. On the contrary, users are more concerned about their privacy when the device is speaking without being asked. They perceive it as a direct intrusion into their social privacy which follows into a direct reaction of privacy protection. This concrete threat towards the device itself rather than in the supplier is grounded in the humanization of the personal assistant as it feels like another person that is suddenly disrupting private situations.