extended-abstract

Making Everyday Things Talk: Speculative Conversations into the Future of Voice Interfaces at Home

Authors:

Anuradha Reddy,

A. Baki Kocaballi,

Iohanna Nicenboim,

Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard,

Maria Luce Lupetti,

Elisa Giaccardi,

Francisca Grommé,

Namrata Primlani,

Paulina Yurman,

Shanti Sumartojo,

Yolande StrengersAuthors Info & Claims

CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Article No.: 23, Pages 1 - 16

https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3450390

Published: 08 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

What if things had a voice? What if we could talk directly to things instead of using a mediating voice interface such as an Alexa or a Google Assistant? In this paper, we share our insights from talking to a pair of boots, a tampon, a perfume bottle, and toilet paper among other everyday things to explore their conversational capabilities. We conducted Thing Interviews using a more-than-human design approach to discover a thing’s perspectives, worldviews and its relations to other humans and nonhumans. Based on our analysis of the speculative conversations, we identified some themes characterizing the emergent qualities of people’s relationships with everyday things. We believe the themes presented in the paper may inspire future research on designing everyday things with conversational capabilities at home.

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2021

2965 pages

ISBN:9781450380959

DOI:10.1145/3411763

Editors:
Yoshifumi Kitamura
Tohoku University, Japan
,
Aaron Quigley
University of New South Wales, Australia
,
Katherine Isbister
University of California Santa Cruz, USA
,
Takeo Igarashi
The University of Tokyo, Japan

Copyright © 2021 Owner/Author.

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Published: 08 May 2021

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May 8 - 13, 2021

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