Browsing with Alexa: Interrogating the impact of voice assistants as web interfaces

Abstract

Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have recently been the subject of lively debates in regard to issues such as artificial intelligence, surveillance, gender stereotypes, and privacy. Less attention, however, has been given to the fact that voice assistants are also web interfaces that might impact on how the web is accessed, understood and employed by users. This article aims to advance work in this context by identifying a range of issues that should spark additional reflections and discussions within communication and media studies and related fields. In particular, the article focuses on three key issues that have to do with long-standing discussions about the social and political impact of the internet: the role of web platforms in shaping information access, the relationship between production and consumption online, and the role of affect in informing engagement with web resources. Considering these issues in regard to voice assistants not only helps contextualize these technologies within existing debates in communication and media studies, but also highlights that voice assistants pose novel questions to internet research, challenging assumptions of what the web looks like as speech becomes one of the key ways to access resources and information online.

Reclaiming the human in machine cultures: Introduction

“…Increasing numbers of scholars do not see these significant departures between communicative AI and existing media as a reason to exclude such technologies from communication and media studies; rather, they advocate for their inclusion precisely because algorithms, AI, and social robots are challenging the boundaries of media studies and of what scholars thought they knew of communication and media (e.g. Fortunati and Edwards, 2020; Gunkel, 2012; Guzman, 2018; Hepp, 2020; Natale and Cooke, 2021; Peter and Kühne, 2018; Reeves, 2016; Sugiyama and Vincent, 2013; Zhao, 2006). Similar to the introduction of personal computers and the internet followed by mobile and social media, algorithms and AI appear to be part of an evolution of media, media systems, and media’s place within society, the scope of which will be yet unknown for some time.…”

Multinomial Naive Bayesian Classifier Framework for Systematic Analysis of Smart IoT Devices

“…Ref. [ 4 ] focused their efforts in this area by emphasizing several problems that might lead to more observations and discussions in media studies, communication, and other related fields. This article examines the role of web platforms in regulating information access, the relationship between online manufacturing and utilization, and the significance of emotion in directing engagement with web resources.…”

Algorithmic photography: a case study of the Huawei Moon Mode controversy

“…The algorithmic turn in photography correlates with broader technocultural transformations regarding the increasing automation of communicative agents. The proliferation of AI-enabled technologies and people’s interaction with them—through automated chatbots, conversational virtual agents, and language-generation software—point to a new paradigm of human-machine communication (HMC) in which enactive machinic agents join forces with human in sociocultural endeavors (Guzman, 2019; Natale and Cooke, 2021). Lomborg and Kapsch (2020) have shown that investigating the ways in which people think, feel, and do about algorithms can ignite concerns, ‘raising consciousness and public debate around algorithmic fairness and transparency, and by extension, the role and ethics of algorithms, data, and technology in broader sense in shaping our society’ (p. 748).…”