Hector2025
| Hector2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Hector2025 |
| Author(s) | Tim Hector |
| Title | Joint journeys: the linguistic domestication of smart speakers and their users in interaction |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, AI Reference List, Voice assistants, Smart speakers, Domestication, Voice user interfaces (VUIs), Media linguistics, Conversational AI |
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| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | AI & Society |
| Volume | 40 |
| Number | 8 |
| Pages | 6037–6057 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1007/s00146-025-02384-w |
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Abstract
This article develops the concept of joint journeys as a metaphor to analyze how smart speakers become embedded in everyday domestic life and to trace the reciprocal, linguistically-mediated processes of domestication. While the domestication framework is well established in media studies, AI-based, networked technologies like smart speakers challenge its underlying assumptions by connecting private households to global infrastructures, thereby blurring boundaries between the public and the private. Drawing on video and audio recordings from German households, the article explores how conversational linguistic practices contribute to the domestication of smart speakers. Using methods from ethnomethodological conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, the study traces how smart speakers become integrated into everyday life, not just materially and functionally but also discursively, through practices relating to placement decisions, adaptation to sequential structures, personalization features, and reactions to malfunction. The article shows that mutual accommodation takes place: while users adapt their language to interface constraints, devices also get ‘personalized’ towards their users. The metaphor of joint journeys emphasizes that the co-evolution of users and devices is an ongoing, non-linear expedition shaped by language, socio-material environments, and infrastructural logics. These observations make it clear that it is through practices and language that AI technologies become integrated into everyday culture, which also raises questions about the broader datafied ecosystems to which interactions with them contribute.
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