"Do animals have accents?": Talking with agents in multi-party conversation

Porcheron, Martin; Fischer, Joel E.; Sharples, Sarah

Abstract

In this paper we unpack the use of conversational agents, or so-called intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), in multi- party conversation amongst a group of friends while they are socialising in a café. IPAs such as Siri or Google Now can be found on a large proportion of personal smartphones and tablets, and are promoted as ‘natural language’ interfaces. The question we pursue here is how they are actually drawn upon in conversational practice? In our work we examine the use of these IPAs in a mundane and common-place setting and employ an ethnomethodological perspective to draw out the character of the IPA-use in conversation. Additionally, we highlight a number of nuanced practicalities of their use in multi-party settings. By providing a depiction of the nature and methodical practice of their use, we are able to contribute our findings to the design of IPAs.

Citation

Porcheron, M., Fischer, J. E., & Sharples, S. (2017). "Do animals have accents?": Talking with agents in multi-party conversation. In CSCW '17 Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing: Proceedings (207-219). https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998298

• Conference Name: 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017)
• Start Date: Feb 25, 2017
• End Date: Mar 1, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Sep 7, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Feb 25, 2017
• Publication Date: Feb 25, 2017
• Deposit Date: Oct 31, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 25, 2017
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 207-219
• Book Title: CSCW '17 Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing: Proceedings
• ISBN: 978-1-4503-4335-0
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998298
• Keywords: Conversational agents; Intelligent personal assistants; Mobile devices; Smartphones; Multi-party conversation; Collocated interaction; Ethnomethodology; Conversation analysis
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/818799
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2998298
• Additional Information: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. New York : ACM Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-4503-4335-0 doi:10.1145/2998181.2998298
• Contract Date: Oct 31, 2016