Oloff2025
| Oloff2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Oloff2025 |
| Author(s) | Florence Oloff |
| Title | “Oh, Now I have to Speak”: Older Adults’ First Encounters with Voice-based Applications in Smartphone Courses |
| Editor(s) | Stephan Habscheid, Tim Hector, Dagmar Hoffmann, David Waldecker |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, AI Reference List, Conversation analysis, Voice assistants, Smartphone use |
| Publisher | transcript Verlag |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Bielefeld |
| Month | |
| Journal | |
| Volume | |
| Number | |
| Pages | 147-179 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.14361/9783839472002-006 |
| ISBN | |
| Organization | |
| Institution | |
| School | |
| Type | |
| Edition | |
| Series | Media in Action |
| Howpublished | |
| Book title | Voice Assistants in Private Homes: Media, Data and Language in Interaction and Discourse |
| Chapter | |
Abstract
This chapter deals with the question of what we can learn from interaction in institutional settings about the usability and learnability of everyday technologies such as voice-based Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), especially for older adults or, more generally, less-expert technology users. Based on an analysis of video recordings made during smartphone courses in adult education centers in Germany, this contribution provides a qualitative and micro-analytical perspective on non-expert adult users’ processes of discovering and exploring voice-based technologies. Using the framework of multimodal conversation analysis, both linguistic formats and embodied actions are examined, revealing the participants’ situated and dynamic understandings of how one type of IPA (as a smartphone app or widget) works and operates. The analysis of these either guided or accidental discoveries of a new technology can provide new insights regarding the specific challenges associated with handling IPAs and instructing new users how to do so. Based on these observations, this chapter also provides some general thoughts on teaching digital skills to less-expert users.
Notes
