Socio-Technical Dialogue and Linguistic Interaction. Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) in the Private Home

Abstract

Abstract The article addresses the phenomenon of voice-controlled assistance systems, or more precisely: smart speakers with voice user interfaces, as they have been finding their way into private households for some time. The public discourse revolves, among other things, around the question of the extent to which the socio-technical exchange with such systems differs from social interaction or increasingly approaches it, and, related to this, whether individual users must adapt to machines or vice versa. At the same time, empirical research shows that socio-technical dialogues and social interaction are often not two separate worlds, but components of a complex practice in which prima facie ontologically different participants are involved. These circumstances make it possible to reconstruct the characteristics of both socio-technical dialogue and the social interaction which is situated around it as linguistically mediated performances from a praxeological perspective. In this context, systematic transitions between socio-technical dialogue and a “meta-interaction space” play an important role, as do various forms of “sequential” processes and their mediation with each other. This article approaches these phenomena based on empirical data from an ongoing research project, notably audio-visual recordings of situations of the initial installation/commissioning of IPA in two- and multi-person households, audio recordings of situations of everyday use, log data of socio-technical dialogue which the systems make available to the users through the corresponding smartphone app.