Intelligente Persönliche Assistenten (IPA) mit Voice User Interfaces (VUI) als ‚Beteiligte‘ in häuslicher Alltags­interaktion. Welchen Aufschluss geben die Protokolldaten der Assistenzsysteme?

Abstract

The paper presents research results emerging from the analysis of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) log data. Based on the assump­tion that media and data, as part of practice, are produced and used cooperatively, the paper discusses how IPA log data can be used to analyze (1) how the IPA systems operate through their connection to platforms and infrastructures, (2) how the dialog systems are de­signed today and (3) how users integrate them into their everyday social interaction. It also asks in which everyday practical contexts the IPA are placed on the system side and on the user side, and how privacy issues in particular are negotiated. It is argued that, in order to be able to investigate these questions, the technical-institutional and the cultural-theoretical perspective on media, which is common in German media linguistics, has to be complemented by a more fun­damental, i.e. social-theoretical and interactionist perspective.

Intelligent Personal Assistants in practice. Situational agencies and the multiple forms of cooperation without consensus

“…1 We also relied on data that users were able to provide as protocol data. These are audio files of the voice user commands which are accessible via the ‘voice history’ stored in the Alexa smartphone app or the user’s Google account; Apple does not offer access to these data (for a more detailed description of this data type and its potential benefit to research see Habscheid et al, 2021). The analysis of these several data sets is carried out by means of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting, 2017) as well as multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin, 2000; Mondada, 2013) on the one hand but also with a praxeological basis on the other (cf.…”

“…Most of the entries in the protocol data follow this pattern. However, as Habscheid et al (2021: 44–45) point out, this data type cannot show the embedding of the voice commands and the use of the smart speaker in the social situation. As we want to refer to agency as ‘managed accomplishment’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 32) from a praxeological perspective, it is necessary to take data types into account which can deal with the social situations as ‘dynamic, emergent, intertwined totalities’ (Schüttpelz and Meyer, 2018: 174).…”