Short abstract:

During voice assistant setup, users negotiate their living arrangements, while adapting to predetermined options. Our study explores how users define their households, examine predefined notions and find infrastructural workarounds, offering insights into their interactions with platform logics.

Long abstract:

During the setup of voice assistants like Alexa or Siri in a domestic context, the assistants ask several questions about their future users. Questions include how many people are in the household and which bank, Amazon, or Google account to connect. In this context, users are often faced with the task of defining their living situation and fitting it into the predetermined options. In this process, digital technologies are adapted to households, and vice-versa, as users enter into a constant negotiation with the platform logics behind smart speakers.

The inquiry about the living arrangement can be interpreted as a moment of calling into question notions about household contexts and implicit, seldom debated, or reflected-upon agreements. In these situations, users can be inspired to discuss their household compositions and to what extent they fit within the device configuration’s boundaries.

Based on recordings of the setup processes of smart speakers and an accompanying interview study, we examine how different users discuss and define their living arrangements for the assistant. For one, we seek to investigate the notions of household predefined by the voice assistants. Further, we investigate how users reflect on their living situation based on these notions and how they attempt to find infrastructural workarounds to make their arrangements fit within the devices’ logics.

These infrastructural modifications range from technical to social adaptations and (sometimes failing) plans to work the assistants into their homes. This provides insights into users’ interactions with a platform that sets various standards for their everyday life.